Andy Kelk


PWC’s Technology Forecast covers DevOps at iProperty

PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) have published their latest technology forecast which looks at DevOps and its importance in enabling businesses to move quickly and succeed. I’m pleased to say that our work at iProperty has been highlighted alongside contributions from companies such as SpaceX, GitHub, Jive and ThoughtWorks. The publication has lots of interesting insights and I’d encourage you to have a read. Below is an extract from the publication which covers our work on CommercialAsia.com:

How two companies move toward the new model

Several companies provide examples of IT transformation to the new IT solution delivery model. […] Within the traditional real estate business, CIO Andy Kelk used DevOps to meet the challenge of enabling a new business model for iProperty Group.

[…]

Another example is iProperty, which operates in an industry that has a very long set of traditions. Recently, iProperty chose to launch an entirely new area of business—commercial real estate—in a few months.

The IT development group was accustomed to “a very traditional approach in which IT code was turned over to QA, which would find all the bugs and then pass it to operations, which would run it and not touch it again until there’s a change request,” says CIO Andy Kelk.

That approach would not work in the short time window required to get iProperty into the commercial business. It was a challenge to “get the developers in the mindset that they are responsible for their code from the moment they start writing until it’s in production,” Kelk says. The successful application of agility and DevOps capabilities allowed the business to succeed. The developers saw the tangible benefits early and could make quick adjustments to software as iProperty deployed and then adjusted its business model.

As a result, “We’re able to deploy changes at any time of day—even multiple times a day—with very minimal risk,” Kelk says. For example, he adds, IT quickly responded to a change from a subscription model, which had been the foundation of iProperty’s residential real estate business, to a different revenue model for commercial property.


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