IT consulting company, exigo, celebrates ten years of existence. Letizia Lukas director of exigo, talks about the changes that take place during this decade. “The client’s needs are not just “IT needs”, as an IT project ultimately reflect business needs”, she said.

Can you explain how exigo evolved in 10 years ?

Within 10 years exigo s.a. evolved from a company focused on providing consulting services around core banking solutions to a much broader, enterprise-wide portfolio of services including business professional services, IT professional services and pure technology-centric services. Our business professional services encompass corporate strategy and governance, business process management, organizational change management, and enterprise-wide program management which includes driving the RFI/RFP processes on behalf of our clients. Our IT professional services focus on development of IT strategy and governance, IT service management processes, alignment with ITIL best practices, business continuity and disaster recovery, enterprise architecture and digitalization. To help our clients implement enterprise-wide projects we also focus of the following technology stacks: cloud and virtualization, storage, and software development in insurance and telecommunication sectors. In addition, we also provide project management services, both traditional and agile, as our consulting efforts cover complete project lifecycle – from initiation to delivery and maintenance.

In ten years, how have the needs of your customers evolved and how have you adapted to serve them?

Many things have changed within past 10 years, and if we have to generalize we would mention the following trend: customers want more efficient solutions and services with a high degree of personalization. The need for increased efficiency and personalization is a reflection of our “always-on” culture and in order to make our clients happy we need to provide efficient, scalable and “smart” services with a high degree of availability and continuity. This has been the driver for the expansion of our services mentioned in the previous paragraph. To meet customer demands requires taking a holistic approach – the one that takes into consideration the synergy (or lack of it) between the Business and IT –  as very often the implementation of a solution takes a horizontal slice through the entire enterprise.

Within the past couple of years, we have witnessed increasing demand for resources for devOps projects, and this trend will only increase as result of current inflows of companies to Luxembourg. It would become more and more challenging to find qualified devOps resources and fast. To fill this demand, we adapted our internal recruitment processes and trained our resource management team on subjects of devOps culture, principles and practices, and we have been very happy with the results.

What, according to exigo, is key to a successful IT project?

The key is to understand the client’s needs, to translate these needs into IT capabilities, and to implement the required capabilities with our team of IT experts, focusing on delivering continuous value following agile methodologies, which include efficient and transparent communication with the client throughout the implementation phase. The client’s needs are not just “IT needs”, as an IT project ultimately reflect business needs. Understanding the business needs are necessary in order to analyse the risks and impacts, and to develop mitigation strategies at the onset of the project. This, in a nutshell is our “recipe” to successful project implementation. Hardly anything new, but applying this recipe requires dedication, discipline, passion to succeed, and first and foremost – well-functioning work teams, without which even a well scoped project with clearly identified deliverables will quickly get off track.

What are the main challenges you and your customers face in an increasingly digital society?

Following the definition by Gartner Research, “digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business”.  The challenges are inherently present in the definition – the business models are rarely well documented, and making changes requires certain knowledge of the model, which is more often than not kept in the minds of the business, rather than captured in clearly defined and documented business processes. This challenge is met with application of the best practices of business analysis, that any company involved in digital transformation projects should have in its arsenal of weapons. The next challenge is to make sure that the cost benefits can be identified, at least in terms of qualitative benefits. Without going into details – as ROIs are difficult to measure – providing the answer whether digitalization of a particular function or business service makes sense or not, is of utmost importance to the client. By landing a helping hand providing an expert guidance we help our clients understand the implementation strategies, the use of technologies, and the tangible and intangible elements that create business value.

What are the development prospects of exigo for years to come?

We see the development of our company as a reflection of the development of our clients and the market. To help our clients become more effective as service providers and stay competitive is certainly a challenging task. It means adoption of DevOps culture, disruptive technologies, cloud services, containers and microservices – to name a few.

We see a shift from traditional virtualization platforms to a more service driven containerization architecture, which allows customers to execute continuous delivery and continuous deployment strategies, tied to the business. This will have an effect on the IT operational model, for instance, the system administrators of today will become the data administrators of tomorrow. In fact, the changes will be so dramatic that today’s understanding of how IT is architected and operated will undergo a paradigm shift. This is where we see our future. These are certainly exciting times and we look forward to the future!