The Runway: Mission 80,000 Feet
By: Amir Arooni, Chief Information Officer at Discover
Continuous improvement. It is the goal I personally live my life by and one that I would love to see implemented at every corner of our day to day work at Discover.
I have been at Discover for just over a year now. What I’ve seen is tremendous work that has brought us to where we are today. Today we have great engineers doing great work, but we are capable of so much more. Through simplifying the development process, forming our teams in such a way that we’re product-focused rather than project-focused, decreasing dependencies, reducing manual work and more, we will elevate from flying at 40,000 feet to 80,000 feet. What was once seen as innovation, is now just regular business as usual. We need to continue to fly to stay ahead of our competitors.
All of this is included in a new model we developed that is comprised of five areas of focus: Highly Skilled Engineering Workforce, Extreme Automation, One Agile Way of Working, Reliability and Technology Optimization, and Discipline and Employee Experience. Each area works in concert with one another and will lead us to our Runway transformation goal.
Highly Skilled Engineering Workforce
We want to celebrate engineering craftsmanship. Our current strategy is focused on hiring experienced engineers and product owners while also developing our existing talent though the Discover Technology Academy. Our model will focus on end-to-end engineers resulting in the elimination of unnecessary handovers, reducing dependencies and allowing for contributions in all aspects of the development, operations and support. We will have a “premier” tech company, a deep pipeline of highly skilled engineers that elevate business capability differentiation, and highly skilled agile teams that produce more capabilities — faster, and with greater quality.
Extreme Automation
Extreme automation frees up talent to work on high-impact initiatives that drive value for our customers. Manual work across the enterprise is identified and assessed through various mechanisms and either optimized if upstream improvement is needed, eliminated if the work is not needed, or automated leveraging the appropriate automation solution. We have invested in process automation technologies like Robotic Process Automation, Business Process Management, Optical Character Recognition and Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery to drive automation forward at an enterprise level. Through leveraging this systemic approach, manual and repetitive work continues to decrease across Discover. We have automated processes ranging from those involved in the availability of our customer-facing solutions to ones impacting our employee experience such as PTO scheduling and awareness.
One Agile Way of Working
In a company as large as ours, it’s common to have multiple processes for similar tasks and we’ve seen this create silos amongst our teams, causing duplication of our efforts. We will iterate, test and learn fast through sprints; regularly promote new features into production, obtain feedback from customers and users, and quickly incorporate learnings into our backlog. By streamlining roles and responsibilities, reducing the number of tools and standardization of the pipelines, it will align the entire enterprise, allowing for one common, agile and consistent way of working, resulting in the reduction of handoffs through a more product mission-aligned vision for our teams.
Reliability & Technology Optimization
At Discover, the customer’s experience and security is our top priority. As an online bank and payments company, our customers expect our products to always be available and secure. Our reliability can’t come second to any of the other aspects of our Runway transformation. This is a focus on reducing the complexity of the platforms that we run our systems on and the tools we develop our applications with. The goal is to simplify the solution choices and speed up delivery, while also improving availability and security.
Employee Experience
This goes back to retaining top talent. Cultivating a strong culture at Discover is what makes us a great place to work and this will remain a focal point as we continue our journey. I started at Discover in April 2020, just a couple weeks after Discover sent all employees to work remotely due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Our focus will remain on enhancing our employee experience to be a modern digital workplace with a seamless remote work experience. We will operate with extreme discipline in financial management, risk management, human resource practices, and simplification of key administrative processes to yield consistency and predictability of operations.
While we have a lot of work ahead of us to reach 80,000 feet, I am fortunate to have the support needed to reach these new heights. Our CEO, Roger Hochschild, fully supports the importance of technology in every area of our company. While we have our eyes set on a destination, The Runway is truly an ongoing journey. It will require everyone to embrace the idea of continuous improvement. While digital transformation often will begin with the technologists at Discover, we cannot do it alone.
