Digital Kaizen — Your business unit needs software engineers (and already has them)
As a business unit, it is hard to get engineering resources even when it would make a big impact on your team’s output. Imagine if you had dedicated engineers who worked on your team, for your team? What could your team accomplish then?
The good news is, you already have them…
Today I’m going to cover the concept of Digital Kaizen — or continuous digital improvement — and how it solves your scarce engineering resourcing dilemma. I’ll end with showing you how to reap its benefits by unlocking members who already exist on your team: Business Technologists, and how you can get started today.
Kaizen —The Philosophy of Continuous Improvement.
In the 1980s, Toyota introduced the concept of Kaizen into their production facilities. At a high level, Kaizen means “continuous improvement”— a philosophy of empowering individuals to actively recommend, design, and implement process improvements.
At Toyota, plant workers are encouraged to constantly identify process improvements. Given that they are the ones performing their jobs, each worker can effectively pinpoint opportunities for improvement.
Toyota credits Kaizen as the philosophy that cemented the company’s place at the top of international competition. The practice remains so effective because it rewards individuals at every level of an organization for automating and optimizing their jobs.
Toyota used Kaizen to continually improve their manufacturing processes. In today’s digital world — Kaizen should be reignited and applied to business units with the philosophy of Digital Kaizen.
Digital Kaizen in your Business Unit
While Kaizen was applied to physical assembly line processes by Toyota, it is just as relevant in today’s digital realm.
Within your team, there is an untapped chance for innovation and process improvement. Like Toyota workers, your team is most qualified to innovate on their processes because they are the ones performing their tasks. However, pulling engineering resources into a non-core product task is perennially difficult to prioritize.
Too often today, continuous improvement isn’t happening because the activation energy is too high and engineering resources too scarce.
Instead, what if your business unit had its own dedicated software engineer (SWE)? Imagine what would happen if your team was able to continuously ideate, develop, and launch custom tooling and digital products. A dedicated SWE would give your team the ability to act on their identified improvements. The impact on the unit’s productivity and innovation would explode in ways few other investments can.
Solving the Scarce Engineering Resources Dilemma
Some of you are probably thinking, “it’s tough times” and engineers are expensive. There is no hiring budget for a full-time software engineer on my team. Worry not!
Whether you realize it or not, you likely already have Business Technologists on your team.
In a recent blog post, I wrote about the Rise of the Business Technologist:
TLDR — Business Technologists are individuals, outside of engineering or IT, whose primary job entails writing software for their business unit.
Do these individuals come to mind? They are the ones on their laptops writing SQL queries and Python scripts to generate automations, reports, and more. They are analytical, excited by challenges, and approach business problems with engineering solutions.
If you are looking for a way to find your Business Technologist, look for the following on LinkedIn profiles:
In pursuit of Digital Kaizen, empower this person to be a resource for your internal development. Let this individual become your in-unit developer, your code ninja, a superpower. In doing so, this Business Technologist is able to not only identify areas of improvement, but build actual tools that automate and implement them.
How to Best Leverage Your Business Technologist
Though the process of unlocking your business technologists might sound daunting, there is a simple framework to keep in mind for Digital Kaizen: Process, Use Cases, and Enablement.
Process: How you go about prioritizing internal tooling initiatives.
The goal is to turn your unit into an innovation engine, constantly prioritizing and implementing the best Digital Kaizen opportunities.
To do this, growth and strategic product thinking are crucial. To get started, hold an open meeting once per week to discuss Kaizen development proposals. This is called a Kaizen Blitz. Set launch dates and KPIs for the product improvements. You will find that your team quickly accelerates at both planning and releasing internal products.
Bonus Note: internal product launches should be celebrated.
Despite these benefits, I must issue warning that there will be misses along the way. There will be times when an optimization doesn’t have the impact everyone hoped for or a proposal ends up being a harder problem than anticipated. This is okay!
The desired outcome is to build a skillset of innovation by continuously improving your processes as a team. If this muscle is strengthened, improvements will come quickly and often.
Use Cases: Categories of tooling being developed
These are some of the use case categories that you can expect to emerge from the Digital Kaizen initiative:
A quick (but wholly inexhaustive) example of each category:
- Workflow Automation / RPA — Run an automated task everyday based on some sort of ‘trigger’ such as a new customer entering a database, an e-commerce shopping cart being abandoned, or a particular time of day.
- ETL — Pull data from a variety of sources (say Snowflake, Salesforce, and in internal database) and generate an output such as a daily report for leadership to review. To do this analysis, a series of python scripts must run on a schedule (e.g. every morning at 9am EST).
- Web Apps / Micro-Applications — An app for quickly looking up product usage metrics for your customers by their username or email. Build a small NodeJS app where the backend queries a customer database or a product metrics platform like Segment.
- REST APIs and Services — A deep topic. High level, turn your internal data sources into APIs that other teams in your org. can safely query. For more on this, see my post on a Services Oriented Architecture for Internal Tools.
- Data Analytics — Consistently run python/SQL scripts for pulling from multiple sources and reporting the latest data conclusions.
Enablement: How to best enable your team to accomplish their Digital Kaizen product goals.
You might be thinking, “there is more to building robust, secure software development than just coming up with business logic.” You are right. In today’s world, a developer needs to do so much more than just code core solution logic. In fact, they need a whole suite of infrastructure support (DevOps / SREs / IT / SecOps). This starts to sound like the business unit needing to rely on engineering again…
Luckily, there are now platforms purpose built to accelerate software development by taking care of managing the underlying infrastructure. These products are called Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs). An example of one designed for Business Technologists is WayScript.
An IDP enables your team’s developers and business technologists by providing the following features:
- Consistent Environments — Your developer wants to have a template for all dashboards which they built using React and NodeJS. This template is published so it can be reused (and shared) on future projects. The environment runs identically in development and production to eliminate infra headaches. They are flexible, support many programming languages, and have built in security monitoring.
- Triggers —Your developer has a program that they want to run everyday at 9am. They also have a web app they’ve coded. Finally, they have a small script they want to run as a microservice when someone queries an endpoint. With an IDP, developers are able to seamlessly set up ways for their programs to run. These triggers includes Cron, HTTP Endpoints (auto-generated), and Web Server Hosting.
- Secure Sign On (SSO) — Your team wants to design a small web app. For security, your SSO provider such as Okta or Auth0 must be built into all applications. An IDP like WayScript automatically builds this into the application environment so it is standardized across all of your apps.
- Cloud Deployment — Your developer needs a way to consistently and effectively deploy various types of applications (see categories above) into a secure cloud environment. An IDP turns this into a consistent, single-click experience.
- Alerting and Logging — When your applications are deployed, your team needs visibility into any errors or bugs. A lot of tedious coding is required to do this for each tool, thereby increasing Activation Energy. An IDP automatically alerts relevant team members if a running application experiences any issues or errors. Errors are automatically logged for faster identification and remediation.
- User Identification and Access Management — Not all programs should be accessible to all users (think about an Admin dashboard that shows sensitive information). Historically, there was serious infrastructure and security work required to construct this type of access control from scratch for each application. However, an IDP allows permission management to happen via an interface (and is linked to the company’s active directory).
- Observability — Your company IT/SRE team cares about what applications are running across the organization. An IDP gives stakeholders a central place to observe (and hault if necessary), applications you’ve developed for your business unit. This visibility combats Shadow-IT.
Conclusion
Digital Kaizen, or Digital Continuous Improvement, has the potential to transform your business unit. It does so by incentivizing and empowering your team to identify processes and act on them. It can also lead to tooling that brings in fresh insights, strategies, and learnings.
To accomplish this, bring a dedicated software engineer onto your team. The good news is, a Business Technologist likely already exists on your team. Leverage these individuals, armed with an Internal Development Platform, to enable Digital Kaizen.
About Me
Jesse Orshan — I am a Co-Founder at WayScript. I have an MBA from Harvard Business School and B.S. from Cornell University.
WayScript is an internal developer platform (IDP) that makes it easy for Business Technologists to write and deploy secure code for their team’s internal tools, data pipelines, and analytics. With WayScript, technologists do not have to rely on core engineering/SRE teams to build and deploy automations, scheduled tasks, and other business processes. WayScript is SOC-2 Type 2 compliant, highlighted as a key technology partner by New Relic, and trusted by teams at Volvo, Heap Analytics, Hopper, Shopee and more.
