CA Technologies: Why we’re predicting ‘experience-centric everything’ in 2014

Unless you work in a corporate data centre, you might never have heard about CA Technologies, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t experienced its products and services.

CA Technologies, whose Canadian branch is based in Toronto with several other offices across the country, makes software that manages everything from refrigerator-sized mainframe computers to business software. In other words, its products manage the things that, if they crash, bring everything in the office to a screeching halt.

No wonder, in its recent end-of-year predictions in the IT management sector, CA Technologies cited “the rise of experience-centric everything” as one of its top picks:

Today, IT services are all about the consumer. This is driving dramatic changes in how applications are developed, which will lead to a rise in experience-driven design and, in turn, necessitate DevOps-style development, a method of developing software where developers and IT operations professionals work together to speed up the delivery of new business services.

To learn more, CommerceLab spoke by phone with Adam Elster, executive vice-president and group executive, Mainframe and Customer Success, and a member of the Executive Management Team. This interview has been edited and condensed.

What drove CA Technologies’ interest in UX design? 

We started about a year and a half ago switching our overall development model. We used to have the classic “waterfall” development model where you came up with all the features and functions you want in a product and build the product over a year, a year-and-a-half to deliver all those features out to the market place. We switched very aggressively to the Agile development model and building out scrum teams. And what we really started learning is when you really start doing the Agile process of bringing users and community into the development process for early feedback, features and functions really became a lot less interesting to end users. We realized that product management is a lot more becoming about learning the user experience (people get) with your product, (and) how the product (is presented to) customers. That really changed how we started prioritizing about how we put features into the product, and it really became much more about ease of use. We really started getting a whole new appreciation for user design.

As you adopt these new development approaches, how do you know when you’ve hit the right notes with respect to UX design, particularly for the kinds of products CA makes? 

I don’t think we’re going to see something like the Bat signal come up to say, ‘Hey, you hit that point.’  We have seen in the last year that the requirements and the pressure from customers is on products being quick to install, easy to use. Things like that far outweighed the requests to support a this-or-that, or an adapter to this-or-that. Those used to be 90 percent of the hot items of customers that would get escalated to us. I would say we’ve seen that cut in half. Quick time to value, fast upgrades, things like that have taken over. I don’t think we’ve hit nirvana yet as far as that, but I think we’ve absolutely seen the shift in where we put our focus.

Many organizations have been talking about becoming ‘mobile-first’ in 2013. How do you see that relating into ‘experience-first’ in 2014?

Well, everything right now is so customer-centric that if you’re building UIs that aren’t mobile-first, that’s not a good use of your time. It’s no surprise, but we’re finding that when we ask customers about how they want to interact with our technology, the first place they want it is on their mobile phone, the next place is on their tablet, then whatever laptop they’re using. It works its way backwards in priority from there. It’s not that some of our standard UIs will go away, they just won’t advance at the same speed. The prioritization is on how people want to use something that works like consumer technology. They want a cloud-based solution, software-as-a-service, on a mobile device. That’s very consistent across all of our portfolio. We would have said that’s a “nice-to-have” two or three years ago. Now it’s minimum requirement to interact with our technology.

To what extent do you see the move to “experience-centric” playing out differently by vertical industry? 

Retail tends to be very, very fast, because consumers’ needs are ever-changing. Financial services will be fast with certain applications. If it’s a standard banking app, that tends to be tackled quicker than if it’s an asset management app. Governments tend to be a little slower, but then when they commit to making a move it tends to be wide-scale. For geographies it can be interesting. For example we’ll see certain markets in the far East that tend to be early adopters of mobile, SaaS and cloud solutions. With North America, and I include Canada in this, what we tend to see is they tend to be early adopters but not at scale. Once they build maturity in terms of the comfort level of the solution, then they tend to be very aggressive, fast adopters. It’s toe-in-the-water, then it’s “Show it to me, prove it to me,” but once they trust in it, they tend to grow very quickly.

What advice do you have for those that might be in smaller or less established companies that want to bring UX design to the forefront? 

You need to show a win. It’s a hard thing, because how do you maintain a balance between maintaining the business models you have and can you afford to take risk and do innovation? The best way to do it is pick one or two projects to work on and think in terms of how you’re going to deliver those to the market, and show proof points (about what UX offers). Then it’s more like the new business model. If you can show success in projects like that, you’re able to translate those into established initiatives.