ITV’s Zoe Carter and Dalet Director of Strategic Alliances and Partners, Ewan Johnston, discussed the coming together of business transformation and technology transformation during episode nine of the DPP podcast.
Speaking with DPP CTO Rowan de Pomerai digesting some of the key themes of the Leaders’ Briefing 2021 summary report and event, Carter, ITV’s Director of Business Transformation for Content, Supply and Distribution, explained how the organisation had been “applying the methodologies of Agile and service design thinking - not from a technical product perspective, but more from a business and corporation perspective”.
As such, Carter said, groups of people were coming together in forums they were not necessarily used to, and solving business challenges with a common goal - how can teams at ITV put aside any competing specific departmental aims to make things better for the consumer?
“The result is a really collaborative way of working,” she said. “The level of conversations we’re having as an organisation are far richer and far more collaborative and engaged than anything I’ve ever seen before.”
ITV Director of Business Transformation for Content, Supply and Distribution, Zoe Carter, at the DPP Leaders' Briefing 2021.
Carter added that these changes required a corresponding transformation in people - their jobs and their skills, so both the organisation and its workforce could be successful.
“It’s very important to how we reskill the workplace,” Carter said. “What we’re asking of the workforce is different; everything has changed in a very short space of time.
“We need to reskill, and retrain ourselves in how we tackle problems than we would have done in the past.”
Dalet’s Johnston noted the extent to which IT innovation was driving business growth and new operating models - highlighted by how Dalet’s own cloud journey had to be more than a ‘lift and shift’ rehosting of previous ways of working.
“That’s what we see in almost every other industry, where technology innovation gets to fuel business transformation and business innovation,” he said.
“The move to the cloud was not just taking on-prem systems and moving it to the cloud. To support business innovation and the requirements of our customers we needed a new approach and a new architecture - and although we’re building on our 30 years’ experience in media we’ve started and built from the ground up a true cloud-native platforms which will allow our customers to take advantage of the benefits of these migrations.”
Interoperability and microservices
Dalet was a sponsor of the DPP Leaders’ Briefing 2021 summary report and event, with Johnston echoing comments from other speakers regarding ways the media supply ecosystem could work together so digital media and broadcast companies could deliver better products and services to their customers.
“The BBC’s Sinead Greenaway encapsulated this,” he said. “Our customers are looking for solutions which are truly interoperable with each other.
“As a vendor it is a key part of my role to work on relationships that Dalet has with the others in the vendor community, who sometimes compete with us sometimes co-operate with us - but we all have to recognise the ecosystem that we are delivering solutions into will have a variety of different components to it, and being able to plug into those and interoperate effectively is what our customers are looking for.
“And we can see that growing as our customers move towards more microservice and cloud-based architectures.”
The DPP Leaders’ Briefing 2021 summary report can be downloaded by DPP members here. If you are not a DPP member, and would like to know more about becoming one, please contact membership@thedpp.com.
To learn more about the DPP’s upcoming Making software integration work research initiative, you can contact Rowan.
