At the AppDynamics Global Tour 2018, AppDynamics customers from BP, Lloyds Banking and Just Eat took part in a Q&A panel to discuss how technology can help towards customer-centric approaches 

All three hosts of the Q&A panel agreed that technologies are moving faster than the pace of companies, so it’s hard to keep pace with everything!

“Four years ago we at Just Eat were chasing Amazon Web Services (AWS), but now most people work on multi-cloud. Investments aren’t always worth it, instead, simply keeping up-to-date is important, but not always for your core project,” said Bennie Johnston, Head of Technology at JustEat to the conference attendees.

“This is where tools and application monitoring (APM) can come in useful, filling the gap of black holes”, added Stefan Dieni, Head of Digital Banking Operations at Lloyds Banking Group.

Creating core partnerships

For Lloyds, APM has helped towards page hits, making customers become a part of their language and the centre of everything they do.

David Rawcliffe, Head of Front Office Oil Trading Systems, BP, agreed with both of the hosts, saying that customer experience is extremely important, as well as good feedback.

“We at BP are trying to be a trading company, partnering with IT and business teams to help understand each other better through natural language processing and core partnerships,” Rawcliffe revealed.

According to Rawcliffe, they have a DevOps team which cares for their apps but traders and the floor need to have an understanding from a teams perspective in order for them to become “game changers”.

In order for BP to be satisfied with the technology they use they have had to sacrifice sprints and pull together as a team.

“Sometimes, you can design an app exactly how you want it, but it isn’t always what people want,” added Rawcliffe.

Overcoming issues

Furthermore, according to Johnston, as long as his app tells him his team’s health then it’s a good metric.

“It’s important to know how productive my team has been, as well as how agile they are”, he continued.

Differently, Lloyds created its customer-centric apps via a basic business model, defining its purpose and why it exists before being funded.

Diene revealed: “Delivering for open banking API platforms typically took around 6 months and was delivered in an agile way. This was tricky because, originally, we used the typical waterfall approach.

“The way we overcome this was by socialising with stakeholders and going live last minute.”

Radcliffe also noted that, if you’re not doing anything frightening, it’s no fun. You don’t want things to be too easy, which is where DevOps and agile comes in useful, giving you the excitement you need!

Written by Leah Alger