A coffee with… Jonathan Boakes, managing director, Infinum

Why is digital transformation (DX) important?

To keep ahead of the competition. It’s also important from a staffing perspective for onboarding and retention: people can get frustrated if they come into an organisation and they’ve got to work with tools that seem antiquated.

What are the secret ingredients of DX?

People. Process. Technology. If you get that combination right, you’re halfway there. But it starts with a genuine desire to want to transform a business and then it’s about trying to get the basics right. And it needs to be something that the entire business is consulted on and continues to be consulted on.

How do you help companies get started on their DX journeys?

We need to understand where the gaps are, to help upskill the team and recruit where necessary but we shouldn’t be in there forever – we’d be looking to migrate back out of the business within a certain time frame: that might be six months or a year or two years, depending on the parameters that are set.

Can you give us an example of how you’ve helped a brand to transform?

We worked with Porsche about five years ago, at a time when Tesla was coming into the market super aggressively. And of course, Porsche’s customers were looking over their shoulders and thinking ‘Well I’m seeing some really exciting stuff happening over there, why’s that not happening here?’

We advised Porsche to focus on its customers, and, depending on where those customers were, they’re going to have different requirements. So, it was important that it had technology hubs in each of these spaces. What we were able to do then was to start to improve some of its existing digital products as well as developing entirely new tech solutions.

Is digital transformation necessary in every aspect of a business?

Possibly not – and sometimes it’s best to take incremental steps. Take one process standalone, see if it can be improved by being digitised, and then, if that works, you can use that as a case to prove to the businesses that DTX is effective.

What’s your top tip for sourcing tech talent?

Consider running your own academies. For the last seven or eight years we’ve been running our own. It started off with iOS, Android training and some web, and now it’s about six or seven different programming languages, UX and product strategy. We invest into it, and then we cream off the top 3% or 5%.

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