Thought Leadership

It is in the very nature of businesses to evolve and adapt to survive and compete, but the current pace of innovation in both technology and business models means that enterprise organisations are needing to move faster, be more radical and take greater risks to reinvent themselves. ‘Being Graciously Disruptive’ is all about striking the right balance between maintaining the status quo and driving forward change. What a ‘state of harmony’ looks like is unique to each organisation depending on factors like industry type (e.g. regulated or not), maturity, scale, leadership, culture, as well as the size and complexity of their legacy IT estate. Some organisations are evolving what they currently have; others are embarking on radical rebuild from the ground up. Both approaches come with significant risk.

Whilst every transformation journey is unique there are common themes and aspects that form the building blocks of reinvention. This event will explore what they are, what the typical risks and pitfalls are, and how to avoid them. John’s talk will draw from his experiences at some of the largest and fastest growing ecommerce businesses in the UK, and our aim through the course of the evening is to explore how other industries can learn from ecommerce to evolve their own ways of being graciously disruptive.

In his role as Head of Commercial Systems, Adrian leads the single largest IT programme the business has ever undertaken; it is critical to the continued growth of the easyJet brand, increasing revenue, and driving forward their customer experience.

The programme (known as FCP) is hugely significant in that it is providing the basis and the means for easyJet to adopt and succeed at continuous transformation, and is driving and enabling the ongoing evolution of their customer proposition.  easyJet recognises constant change is the new normal for enterprise organisations, rather than 'big bang' one-off transformation projects.

The overarching goals of the programme are to enable business agility, whilst radically reducing cost and accelerating the pace of change. The scope is radical and far-reaching, encompassing a decision around 'build v buy', adoption of cloud, agile and microservices.

In his talk, Adrian will outline the programme in more detail, covering the objectives, the approaches and methodologies adopted, the key risks (and how they are mitigated), lessons learnt, successes to date, and what the future looks like.

Adrian's is a fascinating story which has relevance for all senior leaders in enterprise IT.

Maintaining relevancy and market-leadership within a disrupted sector is a constant and growing challenge for enterprise organisations across verticals including Retail, Financial Services / Banking, Media, Insurance and Telecom. In these sectors the digital space has become increasingly competitive with ‘challenger’ startups disrupting traditional business models and revenues, and none more so than in the retail space.

Our guest speaker for this roundtable event is Jamie Ovenden (Digital and Retail Technology Director at Arcadia). Arcadia have been successful in remaining at the forefront of the retail sector for decades, continuing to grow and remain market-leaders both online and on the high street. In his talk Jamie will outline the programme of work Arcadia have carried out over the last three years (with performance experts Capacitas) to derisk their Digital Transformation and meet the challenges of rapid new product development, and scaling up massively during peak trading periods. The programme of work has gone across their entire IT estate, and throughout the customer journey to:

- drive up stability and resilience

- improve response time and throughput

- enable rapid and cost-effective scalability

- optimise efficiency and capacity

This has meant that Arcadia are able to:

• release new products and features faster, with less impact and at lower cost
• outperform their competition in terms of response time, throughput and scalability of their systems at peak trade
• drive down infrastructure costs

Cloud, CI, and Microservices create a perfect storm for performance, availability and capacity management: as the pace of change increases and businesses demand ever greater agility and better cost control it's almost always the non-functional aspects that end up being 2nd class citizens, or simply not addressed at all. This event will explore the key challenges and possible solutions, bringing together IT professionals to debate, share experiences and learn from their peers and industry experts.

Speakers:

Andy Caddy (Group CIO, Virgin Active) Andy is Group CIO at Virgin Active where he gets to combine a passion for health and fitness with a mission to make people’s lives easier through the use of technology. He is currently 15th in the CIO 100 and is a regular speaker on the changing role of the CIO, IoT and big data. Andy’s keynote presentation will look at how customer expectations and market forces are driving IT departments to release code and deliver products faster. Technologies and methodologies such as Cloud, Agile, CI, DevOps, containers and microservices are all enabling this increased demand for velocity of throughput, but in turn they create a perfect storm for performance and capacity management, putting application speed and stability at risk and driving up OPEX costs.

Kim Edwards (Senior Delivery Manager, easyJet) Kim Edwards is responsible for the performance and capacity management of easyJet's commercial IT systems. easyJet has annual revenues of over £4billion and are Europe's leading airline: more than 73m passengers fly with easyJet annually, on over 800 routes across 31 countries. On a single day in October 2015 easyJet.com had 2.6million visits, selling around 800 seats per minute rising to a peak of sales equivalent to filling an Airbus A320 every seven seconds. Kim will take us through his experiences from the last ten years of managing performance and capacity challenges in an environment of rapid business growth in a highly competitive market; ongoing technology change; tight cost control; and extraordinarily spiky demand on peak sales days throughout the year.

Danny Quilton (Director, Capacitas) Danny is a highly regarded thought-leader and practitioner within the field of performance and capacity management. He co-founded Capacitas just over 15 years ago to help enterprise organisations solve performance and capacity challenges, and during this time has worked with the likes of easyJet, BP, Arcadia, RS Components and Nomura Investment Bank. Danny will take us through the role Capacitas have played in easyJet’s journey. His talk will cover strategies for shifting performance left in the product lifecycle and will go into detail on Capacitas' innovative approach to automated performance test execution and analysis within CI.