Bridging the gap between traditional IT infrastructure, Platform Engineering and Innovation | Bruno Almeida

Good afternoon everyone, and thank you for the crowd warm-up after lunch. We are off to a great start with that. So, hi, my name is Bruno, as mentioned. I'm the Vice President of IT Operations at Fortum. I'm responsible for areas such as platform engineering, cybersecurity, service management, and end-user services, among a few other things. So the baseline of the structure of IT. I'm talking about different topics today, including platform engineering. But let me start by addressing Fortum. I think we're in Finland, I think pretty much all of you are, or the majority of you are familiar with Fortum. Fortum is one of the largest clean energy producers of Europe. We have different headquarters in Finland. We have different assets, especially across the Nordics, hydro, nuclear, solar, wind, heating and cooling. A lot of the things in today's world to actually drive the change. Now, when you think about this and translating to IT, what does it mean for us to look at this strategy and how the company is going forward? We established three different priorities in the past year. Customer centricity, looking not just from the external customer point of view, but also internal customer-centricity, looking at topics such as the developer experience, the service management experience, the employee digital experience. Then the cost efficiency as a cornerstone to drive the change, and then the security and reliability as non-negotiables. And this is important to set also the stage for the context for you to understand where I'm coming from and perhaps why we are going through this change and transformation. I will start with something that even though you know Fortum very likely, you don't know that Fortum does a lot of software development. Software development that you might see with the brand of Fortum or any other brand that we might have in the context of having our own innovation and venturing with our own startup ecosystem. Some of the brands that you might see is, of course, Fortum Charge and Drive, Oma Fortum, but Hive and Spring are also products and services that we develop. Now... We started the journey of course five years ago to build in-house software engineering capabilities and I think we are well advanced now at that point. I will tell you one story that was a defining story for my journey at Fortum. And actually, it starts with a colleague called Mika. If you know Fortum and Mika, there's many Mikas, I will not tell the last name for purposes. But I think maybe he will give you a little bit of insights, if you know him, what comes behind this. Mika had an idea, where he had a dream. In Finland, it was, 'Bruno, I have a challenge'. But Mika had a dream and his dream was that he wanted to empower anyone at Fortum to experiment with innovation, digital ideas in six weeks. That's his premise. That was his flag. And it's a very powerful flag. Quick hands up, who works in an enterprise? It's after lunch, so you can also use this as an opportunity to stretch. Okay. Startups. No startups. Oh, startups. All right. Okay. So a lot of, I guess, small, medium-sized companies for the others who want to stretch as well. Yes. Good. So doing innovation is hard in any company, but in an enterprise can be a bit of a nightmare. This is a story of Mika and me. At the same time, this was a few years back, I got tasked by our CIO at the time to look at how can we drive both innovation, but looking at our technology ecosystem and how can we enable this. IT is quite a vast area. So we have quite a lot of pieces on this puzzle. When we started to look at this, and we started to run this exercise that Mika had of allowing anyone to experiment with an idea in six weeks. We started to look at what we needed. It's not enough that you have front-end developers, back-end developers, data engineers, data scientists, agile coach, you have everything. Yet you started to hit barriers. Barriers to be the ones to use it, and the alternative might be that they just take a credit card and do something. We need to make it compelling for them. The other part was this service delivery model. That is a bit of a journey, but looking at what are you actually offering? What is your service offering when you look at platform engineering? So making that catalogue, making that visible in an elevator type of pitch. If someone asks, what's your platform engineering doing? You should be able to tell them in five minutes or less. So understanding what they have to provide in the company. And then once you define that, what are the delivery methods that they choose? Do they want to, will we deliver this internally, externally, is it a hybrid co-development? So understanding all of those nuances and how that interacts with the different layers above is incredibly important. And then the third point was the focus on having a good workflow, understanding the process. Often engineers jump to tools. They jump to development without looking at the picture ahead. Where does this fit? Why am I doing this? So focusing on the process, that impact is incredibly important. And once you identify the process and start mapping those dependencies, then you have the opportunities to automate. Automating shouldn't be an end goal by itself. Automation should be a means to an end. A lot of things don't need to be automated. Some things should, but if it's something that you do once a year, why would you automate it? If it takes you more time to automate it rather than actually delivering it. So finding that balance. And of course, when you look at this totality, you could say that it takes quite a long time to get there. Yes, but you need to start little by little. I think that the most important thing is that you start doing it and that done is better than perfect. So start launching early. That was also one of the key outcomes for us. Thank you so much.