Exclusive Interview with Swapnil Deshpande, Chief Digital Officer, Thoughtworks India

Digital transformation is becoming popular among companies and industries to modify traditional processes into smart and digital business processes and customer experience. It is the integration of digital technologies such as AI, ML, data analytics, IoT, cloud computing, and many more in different areas of a business. It is thriving in the tech-driven market, especially after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here is an exclusive interview with Swapnil Deshpande, Chief Digital Officer, Thoughtworks India, who enlightens the readers about how the company is determined to provide a business transformation with its own digital platform and transformation strategies.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

ThoughtWorks, founded in 1993, provides premium, end-to-end digital strategy, design, and engineering services to enable companies across the globe to successfully and rapidly navigate their digital transformation journeys. It connects strategy to execution, using cross-functional teams of strategists, designers, software engineers, data scientists, and other specialists to deliver value to clients at scale. Four global service lines provide specialized capabilities and thought leadership to drive digital transformation:

• Enterprise modernization, platforms, and cloud: The company modernizes complex operations, platforms, development, and delivery practices to rapidly unleash business value
• Customer experience, product, and design: The team accelerates value creation through extraordinary digital products and customer experiences powered by integrated technology and design.
• Data and AI: The company enables data-driven intelligent products and business insights with pragmatic data strategies, governance, engineering, predictive AI, automation, and ML capabilities.
• Digital transformation and operations: The team augments other services by providing organizations with executable digital strategies, frictionless operating models, and transformation services that increase clients' agility, resilience, and ability to compete for business and retain talent.

Since its inception, ThoughtWorks has been pioneers in trends, such as agile software development, continuous integration, continuous delivery, microservices, evolutionary architecture, and data mesh that now underpin many modern digital businesses.

2. How is your company helping customers deliver relevant business outcomes through the adoption of the company's technology innovations?

Consumer expectations and next-generation technologies are constantly evolving, requiring companies to re-evaluate their business models and undergo end-to-end digital transformations. This trend has only accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is why digital transformation services spending is expected to more than double to US$1 trillion by 2025, according to MarketsandMarkets.

The post-pandemic world has seen a huge acceleration in the transformation work that companies are doing to go digital in their services and offerings to their customers. With companies facing ongoing digital disruption, many lack the capabilities and talent necessary to keep pace with the accelerating rate of technological change.

ThoughtWorks has been a thought leader at the forefront of technology innovation for the past 28 years. It leverages the vast experience to improve clients' ability to respond to change, utilize data assets to unlock new sources of value, and create resilient technology platforms that move with business strategies and rapidly design, deliver and evolve exceptional digital products, and experiences at scale.

With the globally diversified business and clients across all major verticals and geographies, its global distributed agile delivery model operates where clients are and helps them solve their biggest problems. The talent pool of over 9,000 employees working across 17 countries on five continents helps the company achieve the scale to help customers.

Further, the unique, diverse, and cultivating culture, with a reputation for technical excellence and thought leadership, enables the team to attract and retain what they believe is the best talent in the industry.

3. How does your company's strategy facilitate the transformation of an enterprise?

Organizations are getting challenged to transform to adapt and grow in the face of continuous disruption. Innovation, including business model innovation, is almost inevitable for most businesses. Businesses that are digitally capable (modern digital businesses) have an advantage over traditional businesses as they can adapt, evolve, and continuously innovate to compete in the market.

At ThoughtWorks, it connects deep strategic understanding with unrivaled software and platform expertise to enable fast, effective organizational transformation. It makes customers' businesses ready for an unpredictable world.

The company helps customers create a holistic vision for transformation and help them navigate their own digital path by building on the experience of working across multiple business and technology domains as well as across different geographies and work cultures worldwide. Using the Digital Fluency Model, the team understands customer aspirations, readiness, and capabilities and works with them to create a pragmatic roadmap that enables them to deliver value faster.

Some of the services that the company offers to customers to help them with their transformations are delivery and organization transformation; digital platforms and cloud modernization; technology strategy and executive advisory services; data mesh, data platform, and advanced analytics; idea to market, product management transformation; customer experience strategy, product design, and delivery, as well as value-driven portfolio management

4. What are some of the challenges faced by the developer community today?

In the post-pandemic world, the digital transformation pace has changed and there are ever-increasing demands on the IT community, particularly on developers to deliver the value/transformation faster. With the ever-increasing movement of applications to the cloud and the use of various SaaS products throughout the lifecycle of the development, the developers face major challenges to streamline their development process.

Throughout the lifecycle of software development, there are multiple tasks that the developers need to do, which are far beyond the actual development work.  For example, requesting code repositories, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines are some of the things that the development teams must do even before they start writing the first line of the code.  Unless the process is very clear and automated, these things do take time and introduce delays.

As the development progresses, the people in the team may change. The onboarding of the new people and offboarding of the people from the team can also lead to friction.  Every new person in the team must be given a certain level of access to multiple systems involved in the development process, and every outgoing person's access must be taken away to ensure the appropriate access control.  Unless the process is simplified (or automated), there are chances that the wrong onboarding or offboarding may lead to security non-compliance.

Developing new applications often involves integrating with other existing applications. The integration is done via API route or via event streaming.  One of the biggest frictions the development teams face in the journey of integration is the discoverability and getting secure access to the available core assets (APIs, events) for integration.  It could take many days to find out what is available, how to get access to the right APIs or events unless a well-established API marketplace to discover and gain access to core digital assets is present.

In large enterprises, often there is a 'ticketing system that is used for communicating between different teams.  The organizational processes require each development team to create a 'ticket' for anything and everything that is required of the other team.  Sometimes, there is a lot of back and forth on the tickets between the teams until they get to the required answer.  This introduces a lot of friction and communication delays in the process.

In addition to some of the above frictions, it's also important for the development teams to focus on the delivery metrics to understand their development workflow and how their team is working to deliver intended outcomes. Four key metrics (4KM) is one such industry-recognized metric that helps the development team understand how efficiently they are building and deploying the software. However, many teams find it difficult to automate and build the metrics like 4KM that talk about their delivery efficiency, and many of the process gaps, issues go unnoticed.

So, to summarize, the challenges that the development teams and developers face during their development cycle are that of two types:

1. Development process friction: Some of which include onboarding, offboarding of the team members, discoverability of core assets, and tracking delivery metrics.

2. Operational process friction: Some of which include the setting up of the infrastructure (or iteration 0), working with multiple teams to collaborate, managing and responding to tickets, and getting access to core assets.

These challenges introduce delays and slow down the development process, introduce frictions, and could potentially leave the development teams unhappy and frustrated, even while doing small and simple things.

5. What was the idea behind building NEO and making it available to ThoughtWorks developers?

At ThoughtWorks, the developers are the biggest and the most important internal community.

The company has been investing in building a world-class internal development platform for the last few years and considered the time to take the next step and reimagine the digital platform, this time, keeping the top internal stakeholders at the core of thinking— ThoughtWorks developers.

Reimagining the internal developer platform, through the lens of the developer, pushed ThoughtWorks IT to rethink the approach and helped the team move from 'what do developers need' to 'what do developers need and how can the company make it available to them in an easy and intuitive manner.

The developers build apps or products all the time.  Apart from building important solutions for customers, it also has a thriving internal application development community.  People build software for learning new things and develop new capabilities in this company. For example, in addressing a business need, ThoughtWorks developers may build an application supporting a sales team to expand into a new area, geography efforts.

After doing research and talking to many developers, the team realized that the process to kickstart a new idea or project often was not easy for people to follow.  It was often an inconsistent and fragmented experience.  They had to fill up multiple forms, talk to many teams separately and the overall experience left developers frustrated.   It used to take almost ten days for people to get hold of the basic infrastructure to start coding, seven days to get access to relevant APIs, and security approvals to name just a few. The time for building even a simple application and taking it to production was between two to five months.  The team had to do something to address this.

So, after observing, speaking with, and interacting with 200+ ThoughtWorkers across 30+ offices in more than 15 countries who develop applications, the team started reimagining the whole internal developer platform experience. This time the team kept the developer and their experience of building products at the center of the thinking.

The idea behind NEO was to make it easy for the internal development teams to build better products, faster while saving time, costs and improving the overall security of the applications being developed.

NEO enables developers to build ideas that matter, liberates the data and core assets that are held within global IT systems, and accelerates innovation within ThoughtWorks.  It speeds up the entire delivery and development cycle.

6. Is this platform only available to Thoughtworks developers or is it also available to other developers also?

At this time, NEO is only available to ThoughtWorks employees and the contractors who support the building of the internal applications.  NEO is used to build experimental applications, innovations, and business-centric applications.

NEO is the internal manifestation of ThoughtWorksDigital Platform Strategy and it helps in developing better products and faster.

As part of "ThoughtWorks on ThoughtWorks", the team is sharing the insights and lessons learned with the experience of developing NEO to build a great experience for developers. The aim of the company is that customers can envisage leveraging this idea for their own digital platforms to create the same for their developers.

Recently, Thoughtworks also announced partnering with Spotify to deliver better developer effectiveness with Backstage and helped TELUS, one of the customers, deliver the Backstage developer portal for improving the developer experience for their 8,000 engineers.

This shows how the industry is now recognizing the 'developer experience' as one of the important aspects of the digital platform strategy.

7. How does ThoughtWorks aim to leverage this concept of developer experience for the developer community?

NEO already has significantly changed the way developers build products within ThoughtWorks. It has unified and streamlined the developer experience around the internal developer platform.  It has reduced the time to provision infrastructure by over 90%, introduced easy discoverability of the core assets, significantly reduced the friction in managing teams and infrastructure for the team, and introduced a new default start place for developers to go to for all their needs.

With some of the best developer talent in the world working with the company, the team can continue to rely on the developer community to provide honest and relevant feedback on improving the developer experience with NEO.

The major benefits ThoughtWorks has achieved from NEO are:

• Bringing all developer resources and apps together from multiple different teams (20+ teams) of the organization into a single place for streamlined management
• By automating processes and integrating cloud operations with NEO, ThoughtWorkshas significantly reduced time to infra provisioning by 90%. Reducing from as many as 7+ days to less than one day.
• ThoughtWorks is building new internal products and services faster, reducing the time from more than five months for a new application to less than a few weeks, savingThoughtWorks both time and money
• Integration with Google cloud platform, Github, CircleCI, Okta, and among others has become a lot simpler and more secure due to NEO automated provisioning
• Self-serve capability to create and manage the teams (across multiple infrastructure providers) helps with secure and seamless access to resources
• Easy discoverability of API or events with NEO helps developers discover, access, and use the core assets for delivering better and interconnected products and services
• Centralized metadata management capability helped to manage common organizational content (such as locations). This has reduced the time to change our systems for common content from multiple weeks to less than a day.
• 4KM reports built on NEO helps teams understand the delivery performance, potential issues and take necessary actions to speed up the delivery cycles
• Centralized application catalog helps the developers discover interesting applications and contribute to them
• Easy discoverability of data assets has helped operational leaders to understand what operational & data insights are available on the data platform and how to get access to them

Now, here is how the company plans to leverage the concept of developer experience for the developer community:

Use it for better, faster internal product development: By introducing the concept of the developer experience product like NEO, the team continues to push the boundaries of how it builds the internal product.  Faster and better development means it will be able to respond to new business requirements faster than ever.

With customers: In my opinion, NEO is an example of the 'digital platform done well'. It reduces the friction from the delivery process, makes the core assets and other platform services discoverable and easily accessible, and accelerates innovation and experimentation within the organization.  Sharing internal learnings with customers helps to save our customers from going through the problems that this company has gone through as an organization.

With the industry: Creating an extraordinary impact on the technology industry through culture and technology excellence is the core part of the purpose of ThoughtWorks (WHY as the team calls it).  It's all about working with each other to push the industry forward and help companies and communities do the right things. The team believes that the learning and the way that has been approaching the internal developer platform concept through the lens of developer experience helps to put a new and unique point of view that could benefit a larger community.

After all, happier developers result in better products, better work environments, and generally stay good for the companies and communities.

8. Would you also like to give some more details about how NEO is being used at ThoughtWorks? How has it been progressing?

The thinking around NEO started back in Q2-CY2020 and its journey has progressed through multiple iterations to where it is today.

The Alpha version of NEO went live for a very limited set of users (up to 40 invited folks) around November 2020.  The Alpha plus version went live in January 2021 and has expanded to more early adopters to get more feedback.  The beta launch happened earlier this year in July 2021 and the full product launch started August 2021 onwards across different countries.

Since its Alpha launch, the developers globally have been actively and progressively been using NEO for their application development needs.  Here are some of the statistics:

• 2000+ ThoughtWorkers (developers) across various countries have visited and interacted with NEO
• 450+ active developers in 300+ teams have used NEO for their application development needs
• 285+ applications available and discoverable in the NEO application catalog
• 60+ APIs and 200+ events available and discoverable through NEO
• 12+ active products using 4KM for delivery performance

With more and more features being added, it is believed that NEO will continue to play an influencing role within ThoughtWorks for the internal product development process.

9. How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

A few key industry trends are driving spending for digital transformation:

• Expansion of computing boundaries: Rapid development of platforms, cloud, and internet of things are pushing the technology industry to new heights. This is made possible by the expanding boundaries of computing pushing the edges of what is possible for enterprises.
• The rapid advancement of AI- and ML-based tools: As artificial intelligence and machine learning gain more industry adoption, they enhance productivity and drive digital transformation by making predictions to assist humans in making decisions, and in some cases, by automating decision-making and tasks completely. The benefits of rapid advancement in AI- and ML-based tools can be applied across the entire value chain of business processes, from manufacturing and maintenance to marketing and customer service.
• Enhanced consumer experiences: The pervasiveness of technology has enhanced modern consumer experiences with the integration of digital and physical worlds, such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality. Consumers are not just demanding availability and accessibility— they expect experiences to be personalized and interactions to be seamless and rich. Enterprises are moving quickly to deliver an omnichannel experience across platforms with evolving interfaces that blend speech, touch, and visuals.
• Accelerating towards sustainability: Consumers increasingly factor sustainability into their decision-making when choosing a brand or supplier. This requires businesses to examine the environmental impact of their products and operations, including their carbon footprint, and to adopt more sustainable strategies and technologies, such as green cloud optimization.
• The growing impact of hostile tech and increased focus on information privacy: The increased complexity of technology presents a heightened risk of cyberattacks, computer malware, viruses, social engineering, employee misuse as well as data and security breaches. Privacy is also a key priority for consumers, with an increased focus on data sharing and growing awareness of the impact of AI and algorithmic bias.