Create a culture that's comfortable with continuous improvements for new IT rollouts

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Sven Gerjets, chief technology officer of Pearson, talks about how IT teams can improve the user experience to add value faster.

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"It creates a hard balance. In one aspect, we have to keep delivering functionality and that functionality often touches legacy which doesn't mean it's quick and you know we can get to market fast.

But we have to keep that funnel flowing, on the other hand we have to figure out architecturally how we start wrapping some of this legacy to create faster time to market and also to start creating a culture where our businesses may be comfortable with things that aren't perfect out of the gate so that we can test them and figure out what works and what doesn't and then ultimately backport those into the legacy.

All the while we've got to figure out how to get that legacy faster which means we're going through you know iterations of replacements of technologies with with new modernized things.

Some of the other things that we're doing to create more agility is moving away from a siloed technology stack, a CRM billing system, an order management system to creating service-based layers of user experience that can touch in to all of those, so we can iterate on the user experience layer, it may be quicker in some scenarios and then adjust the the functional systems which take a little bit more time, so that were actually able to add value faster and that's been a successful model."


Read Scott Koegler's article, "Evolving infrastructure keeps CIOs on their toes."


Sven Gerjets is Chief Technology Officer at Pearson. Prior to joining Pearson, Gerjets was Senior Vice President of Information Technology at DIRECTV where he was responsible for delivering the full lifecycle of IT business value at DIRECTV starting with business solution definition through delivery into production.

Nano Serwich is Editor of The Enterprisers Project and Global Awareness Content Manager at Red Hat.