[ad_1]
Listen to the article 6 minutes This audio is automatically generated. If you have any feedback please let us know.
Innovation at scale requires a confluence of people, processes, and technology, each of which can present a challenge. Technical talent remains difficult to obtain, system rigidity can hinder creativity and the tools of the developer’s trade are constantly evolving.
Discover Financial Services committed to tackling these challenges nearly four years ago through a comprehensive digital transformation that Amir Arouni, the company’s former EVP and CIO, dubbed “Project Runway.”
Angel Diaz, vice president of technology capabilities and innovation at Discover, tells CIO Dive that technology is closely tied to business goals.
“We are passionate about helping our customers manage money, and that permeates our entire culture,” Diaz said. “That means we have to keep getting better every day and focus on becoming more digital. That means we need technology teams that support that process and technology platforms that support those technology teams.” Support.”
As part of the initiative, Arouni, who was succeeded by Jason Strahl following his retirement last summer, established an in-house tech academy and brought open source into Discover’s coding lexicon.
Prioritizing the Tech Academy and fostering Discover’s elite engineer advancement program have been key to building an innovation culture.
Open source, such as cloud, automation and emerging generic AI capabilities, represent another digital toolbox that Discover is using to accelerate digital transformation.
“If you look at this democratization of technologies, it’s happened through code, community, culture, and people working together and getting massive consensus from different perspectives and use cases,” Diaz said.
The company expanded its active commitment to collaborative coding practices early last year, joining the Linux Foundation and the Fintech Open Source Foundation, known as FinOS, in February and concurrently launching an open-source Developer website launched.
As the year ended, the company tapped former IT executive Michael Rhodes, previously Discover’s group head of innovation, technology and shared services, to serve as CEO and president in December.
building on a theme
The shift to open source has already accelerated the development process within Discover’s in-house innovation lab.
According to Lise Noble, distinguished engineer of UI/UX at Discover, the company’s inaugural open-source project, the Theme Builder Accessibility Tool, went from concept to pilot in just five months. This tool helps developers more easily build user experience features into Discover Technology solutions.
“Right now, we’re identifying areas where we can incorporate the theme builder into building customer-facing technologies,” Noble said.
Lise Noble, Distinguished UI/UX Engineer at Discover.
Allowed by Discover Financial Services
Theme Builder aims to simplify the end-to-end CX interface creation process from design and development to deployment using a modular toolkit that adapts with changing needs.
“As we add wearables and tablets to mobile and desktop, creating user experiences becomes more complex and we have late modes and dark modes — accessibility becomes a moving target,” Noble said.
Noble compared the solution to building with Lego bricks. Developers start with small design features like fonts and icons, create parts of the tool, and then create templates that become experiences that can adapt to the user’s needs.
This tool is designed for multiple applications and potential use cases.
“There are already some products coming out of our Innovation Accelerator Lab that use Theme Builder technology,” Noble said. “And we have an Ideas app where you can submit an idea and then follow it through its progress, get other people involved, get sponsors and apply for patents “
An open culture of innovation
Discover has adopted open source to provide its engineers with the tools to accelerate product innovation. But this change is also aimed at supporting employees.
Fostering engagement and project enthusiasm among engineers and developers is key to retaining talent and sustaining innovation. Discover’s success in these areas earned industry recognition in November, when Foundry’s Computerworld named the company to its list of Best Enterprise IT Shops for the 20th consecutive year.
Discover in November promoted Keith Nielsen, a 22-year engineering veteran and open-source innovator, to the position of Distinguished Engineer, Director-level leadership position. “We live in a world where the pace of technology and business innovation is fueled by open-source communities,” Diaz said in the announcement, pointing to Nielsen’s success in leveraging open-source capabilities. .
From a management perspective, open source not only drives process and design innovations, but it also accelerates delivery times for products like theme builders.
“If you’re a product owner working with customer journey features, we have standard ways defined by the community for how we do it,” Diaz said. “If you’re an engineer writing code, we also have standard ways to do that.”
As open-source methodology works its way through Discover’s Tech Academy, it is also creating a more efficient innovation culture.
“Our engineers can move from one team to another and the onboarding time goes from a month to a day,” Diaz said.
According to Diaz, there was an internal logic to this change, as most of the code used in software development originates in the open-source community.
“Even if you buy your software, it has open source inside it,” Diaz said. “Actively participating in the open source community helps us as consumers and it also helps us shape the development of those technologies.”
Source: www.ciodive.com
[ad_2]
