 In this session, Joji will look into how MERSC technology has adopted agile EA inspired by agile lean practices to accelerate the digital transformation journey organizationally so warm virtual welcome Joji George over to you. Thank you, Steve. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Oh, thank you. Hi, everybody. Thank you. Welcome to this session. I hope you and your family are healthy and safe. This is I'm dialing in from Bangalore. Before I start, let me give you context to this. So, when I joined MERSC, the idea was to, you know, start the digital transformation journey there and the last six to seven years, right. I have been mostly involved in in the transformation journey is in two major domains. One is healthcare and other is obviously transport and logistics. And without much, I'll just jump into the first thing. So before we start on that, let's look at some of the key drivers, which is, which is, you know, making digital transformation I must have in today's world, right? And this is also from what we see in the industry today. And it's from the top, you know, the connectivity. We are all in a connector world today. We have social media mobile apps, you know, a lot of IoT cloud. All this is, you know, helping us get connected. And that's having an impact on the behavior that the customers have, right? They want a multi channel experience. They want things to seamlessly move around. And that's one of the big drivers for digital transformation. The second aspect is obviously about the expectations that and the new digital native solutions out there. The expectations from our customers are, you know, increasing like never before. You know, it's not just important enough that we do our traditional things. So the traditional organizations like most and others. We have, you know, adopted digital in every form and factor that they could do so that they can not only be in the race for digitalization but also be not disrupted by the digital disruptors that we see in the industries. So our key factor is about speed and agility. And this is nothing new in the digital world. We know everything is about having speed and being agile in what we deliver to the business. And key to that is obviously that in the new world, it's all about being faster rather than slow. One of the errors when we said being big is enough for small players in the market. And finally, the competition is increasing as never before. We have digital players out there. We have the traditional businesses. So the only way we can, the traditional companies like most can survive is, you know, be there. We can take these still as the competitive advantage to what they do and serve its customers much more better. With that, if you look at how this is all getting, you know, translated and data is one single factor which is driving all this. Let me dive a little bit into where we see ourselves from a real world example. On the left is a story representation of what a transport and logistics industry is going through. The expectations that the customers have is all about how can we not only do just transport my cargo from point A to point B. It's also about, you know, how do I get complete visibility to that? How am I, you know, knowing all the exceptions that happen? It's also about what happened to the cargo I send out. If it's about your fruits and vegetables you send out, you want to know whether it survived the whole transit. So there are multiple factors that is driving here those things. And if you look at transport and logistics as an industry, we have way behind in digitalization. There's a lot of still paperwork happening. There's a lot of handouts because of the nature of the business we cross borders on the land and on the ocean. And that's a pretty complex business to be in. Customers all but today demand the ease of business and the flexibility that we see in many other industries. And one of the industries which is closest to what we do is airline and they demand that, you know, we are as fast and flexible as the airline industries. Which means that we have to manage multiple integration, integrations not only within the ecosystem we work in but also with the customers themselves. We integrate directly into their enterprise systems so that they are able to manage and orchestrate their supply chain better. Now that help what we are doing from technology standpoint is obviously the use of IOTs with data and cloud to enable all that and also to integrate with the new ways of integration in technology. So on the on the right is Q-scan from the healthcare. At GE we were the first in the industry to launch a digital platform. Today that platform powers many AI applications and those applications are helping physicians and make better decisions. And if you look at it today, the relevance of some of these applications are even more than those four or five years back. And in this era, in this times of pandemic when we are in a lockdown, things like virtual board meetings and telemedicine is even more important and that all started many years back. So if you look at that, this is all possible because of the data we generate and are able to harness the power of the data. And we heard a lot of speakers talk about that. And that's about the terabytes and petabytes of data we are able to make sense out of. Shifting gear to how does he play a role in that, right? And let me draw upon the story we have. Another is a traditional 100 plus year organization, which has multiple businesses internally and used to operate in in silos, obviously, and then the mergers and accusations obviously didn't help much in getting that even better. However, when we started the digital journey became very clear that we have to have a centralized enterprise architecture as a function that will help us quickly transform this. And then we shifted from the left to the right, but as is normal with any transformation journey, the, the culture, the cultural aspect of the organization, the ways of working in the organization. We meant that we are following a traditional centralized model, which may meant that we have many multiple reviews and approval processes in place. We were not able to get the agility we wanted as a businesses didn't see the perceived outcomes that we wanted. And what it quickly led to was obviously a not a true agile way of working. We moved away from being talking about minimal viable products and, you know, you could delivery times to multi year plans and programs, right? Which naturally did not go very well with the organizational ambition of being a digital organization going forward. However, when we, while this was all happening, we, we two years around two years back we formed a digital organization within Merse. And that's where I joined to head architecture. And that was for us a green field to start and look at how can we disrupt ourselves and take some of the learning from the agile and lean process into the architecture practice itself and also within the organization engineering and stuff right and we found what we call the agile operating model. But before we, we know we know that right. Right. There is not a work just technology that has multiple aspects to it as a process. It has a process part to it as a technology part to it and then we see the agility that the business brings up. The class is popularized by Leibon as the domains of agility. We also look at all those aspects and say how do we take into consideration some of those good practices that brings for business really be it from a agile organization perspective, be it from processes like, you know, from and save or from a technology practices like DevOps, you know, and the content practices. And what you see is a, you know, a, a attempt at that which combines some of those learnings with the principles and practices that we have into a gap. And we found that. And we try to experience this. This talk has was focused on two key elements. The first is about minimal viable architecture, and the second is about DevOps right. How do we iterate faster, and be together with the needs of the business. And the philosophy was that how do we move away from architectures seen as an ivory tower and rather and not focus on too much of a friend design and but take architecture to the teams and work closely with the teams and I treat architecting and delivering in tandem. Now that meant that we also have had to bring in some changes within the engineering operate organizations. We said the teams are agents of the architecture. Architects are there to support and be there throughout the lifecycle of the products that we're doing. And with each learning with the feedback loop, we would iterate through that and then, you know, deliver in a faster mechanism. Now, when while this this was happening, the, the, the idea behind digital was also what we is typically called as the pie model, it model. And we still had the traditional and we had digital on the way. And within the enterprise architecture team that we had, we also looked at a lot of the good techniques we have today to enable transformation within the business itself. Right. How do we enable that you know the business process optimized. We took business capability model as a framework to look at and map the whole business that we have today with the most. And that led to creating what we call the applications landscape, and we started looking at how do we rationalize that. In a century old organization, obviously this landscape we have technologies and platforms, which is like two and three decades old to some of the latest which is based on cloud and big data. Then we also looked at what is the reference architecture we are looking at. What is the target we want to achieve in a couple of years from now. And it's also led to a lot of changes within the organization and say, how do we move from the traditional hierarchical organization to be more general organization. And that's a journey we are still continuing today. We are in a phase that we are the next piece of the transmission we were looking at the things that we had in digital and bring that into the whole organization and make digital code to the organization. And for that, we're also looking at taking some of these agile concepts and architecture concepts and say how do we take that across the whole technology organization that we have today. And it's not done. We see this as a big, big factor in the whole organizational change and the, and the thinking process of how do we accelerate the journey we are in, and how do we take some of these learnings into the organization. One of the big example we have is that we have architecture as a centralized function within the organization, so that we can use that techniques within that to develop new business processes with and optimize the current business process so that digitization is faster and we can get the results that the business is looking for. Yeah, with that I will conclude my talk here and thank you for your attention and I will respond to the queries we have any towards the end. Thank you.