By Chris Murphy, CEO, Thoughtworks North America
In today's hyper-competitive landscape, delivering customer value quickly and cost-effectively is crucial for businesses to stay ahead of the game, particularly in the face of engineering-led digital giants disrupting new industries with their operational, marketing and engineering scale. To succeed, companies must prioritize innovation, collaboration and efficiency in their engineering efforts to unlock their full potential.
Organizations that prioritize collaboration between engineering and business departments and foster a strong engineering culture to support their corporate strategies are better poised to adapt with agility no matter the market or tech-driven disruption. Once this “adaptive mindset” is embedded organically throughout all levels of the organization, operating models will evolve and organizational value is created beyond that of a single digital transformation initiative.
An example of a technology-driven organization who knows how to drive digital reinvention and accelerate product development using modern software development practices is BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), a leading global medical technology company, who has already embarked on its value-driven, digital transformation journey, led by Gunther Lenz of Software R&D at BD.
As their BD Biosciences business moves rapidly into the future of next generation discovery and diagnosis, it is underpinning its digital transformation with modern software development principles, cutting edge architectural approaches and a frictionless operating model to meet the increasing digital demands of its research scientist, clinician and laboratory customers. As part of this, Thoughtworks and BD engineering teams worked side-by-side to modernize capabilities for greater scale and modularity.
BD Biosciences was able to accelerate the cycle time of new software features and capabilities for its flow cytometry instruments used in medical research and diagnosis. Recognizing that digital transformation is also a cultural and mindset shift, BD also prioritized empowering its teams to speed innovation-focused growth.
At Thoughtworks, we find that organizations that center on bringing new value to customers and developing capabilities for continuous, iterative change are most likely to experience success in digital transformations. In addition to our deep industry expertise in agile software development, continuous integration and DevOps, Thoughtworks also brings numerous new innovative trends such as data mesh to the life sciences domain.
For 25+ years, we’ve built a thought leadership engine that we believe is consistently pioneering technology-driven business change and we look forward to helping other organizations bring innovative experiences to their customers.