Quite a few things need to work right to steer organizations toward a successful digital transformation journey. David Atkinson, VP, Data and Analytics, Sun Life, speaks with Christopher Bergh, CEO, Data Kitchen about the role of agile in transformation and the various ingredients that need to work together to make the transformation successful.

Atkinson is in charge of data analytics at Sun Life. He has been with the organization for about 11 years and has been in the financial services industry for a little over 20 years.

Sun Life is undergoing a digital transformation, and the goal is to become a digital-first company that can create better digital experiences for clients across channels and deliver personalized experiences.

Atkinson mentions that DevOps is a part of the digital transformation, as is agile. “Data engineering principles help us accelerate the journey. Being able to build reusable capabilities, data products, leveraging DevOps principles and spin-offs like data ops models along with data factory principles really helps us accelerate our ability to make the right data available, at the right times and for the right reasons.”

When asked how the organization has been applying agility to data analysis teams, he says that the transition to agile has been instrumental in breaking down some of the traditional IT and business divide. Sun Life now has agile pods running that include people from the business and IT sides.

“Within our data analytics team, about 60% of our work is now agile. And these pods are of eight to 10 resources, including both business and IT. We set up the teams and then have them go through training and orientation together. They decide on their team operating model and manage their user stories, backlog estimation, etc.,” Atkinson explains.

He says that since the teams are typically multi-disciplinary, it also brings along the added benefit of learning new skills through cross-training. “There’s still some areas of the business that are much better suited to the traditional project-in-waterfall based approach. But by and large, we’ve had a really good uptake of agile as their preferred delivery model across the organization,” Atkinson says. “I would say that agile combination with DevOps practices and a client-centric approach have really been giving us some great benefits in terms of a closer partnership with IT, delivering better capabilities, faster, and with more openness to test and learn.” 

Next, Atkinson talks about nurturing the transformation mindset and making it work in the organization. He reveals that the mindset and transformation have been led right from the top of the organization with active support from organizational leaders like the CEO and CIO in pushing the transformation journey. He also attributes a lot of it to internal buy-ins to the newer ways of working and operating. 

“This is more than just solutions development — it’s about owning and operating the product over its entire life cycle. This is a big culture shift for us in a number of areas, including how we design and prioritize new features and functions, how we organize teams and accountabilities, and how we even fund and charge back for the ongoing product,” he adds.

He continues, highlighting the “key ingredients” that enabled the journey. Atkinson maintains that it is not one or two items but a whole bunch of constants and variables that must work together to make it happen.

“The key ingredient has been bringing all those things together at the same time — data analysts; building and modernizing our tech stack; our move to the cloud; agile changing the way that we work in our partnership with the business; DevOps processes and principles; leveraging APIs, and looking for ways to be able to integrate new capabilities quickly. I think they all have to go together for us to be successful in this area,” he concludes.