DevOpsCon December 2018

How to apply DevOps in a traditional and large enterprise is a hot topic. Terms like digitization and transformation are now common buzzwords among management, thus defining a technology roadmap and reinventing your business with software is a must if you want to excel or even survive. It is clear that today, no company can't compete without technology, the question is: how do we use that technology efficiently?

For years, the community has given answers to the growing and demanding IT requirements: Agile methodologies are there since the early 2000s, as a result, in the last 10 years a DevOps culture has been developed, and there are multiple successful stories that prove its value. Nonetheless, often stakeholders are very disappointed about how IT works in their companies: software often fails, misses deadlines, is expensive, unmaintainable and tech trends change rapidly. Even if state of the art technologies are applied and enable such transformations, there is still a long road ahead to achieve such DevOps culture.

At MindDoc, we have the ambitious challenge of transforming traditional healthcare services with software solutions that improve the delivery of care to our patients. At first glance, nothing differs from any other business who wants to transform. However, there are many ways in which you can approach digitization in a traditional enterprise, often with a strong focus on outsourcing. Instead, we follow a "digital unit" approach, which puts an emphasis on organizational independence, in-house development, and fewer communication dependencies. Getting the best of a startup and a big company is mainly the goal of such approach, with plenty of challenges and tough decisions.

As a result, we present the chronology of how is the internal development of an online therapy platform in one year, from zero to a product that can be constantly shaped based on the needs of our patients and therapists. Challenges like recruitment, old IT interfacing, keep solving problems with code, cross-functional communication, scaling Agile teams, process compliance, security, what to outsource... are still there, and a digital unit approach gives the flexibility needed to provide solutions for them.