"Digital transformation demands different blood groups to those of the past, and more software and data science specialists. It also demands different training methods. This is why we’re organizing hackathons within Itility and participating in the hackatrain, for example.”

“In assisting customers with digital transformation, we use the concept of ‘drink your own champagne’. Only when we do and experience it ourselves can we really help our customers with their digital transformation,” says Ritzer.

“So one of the things we’ve done is to set up a Cloud platform (Itility Cloud Control), through which we can digitally manage both our own IT infrastructure and the IT environments of our customers. It’s fully automated, like a robot-driven production line. Through analytics, we’re continually learning from what happens and predicting how the IT landscape behaves and how it can be improved.”

A robot-driven IT platform like this demands different IT blood groups to those of the past: the semi-finished products specialist who clicks together infra products, rather than building them himself; the software guy who automates via pipelines and integrates everything through code; the UX designer who implements the reports for the end customer, and the data science specialist who extracts data from the platform to make it ever smarter through machine learning.

“In order to deploy these other blood groups, we need to do more than read books or take training courses,” explains Ritzer. “We need to learn by doing, to try out new things in a lab environment and to take quick deep dives into the content. This is why we are organizing hackathons within Itility. In a short time, we solve a problem based on software and data, in small agile teams racing against the clock. There’s a competitive element to it: who will win this challenge?”