Thriving for Excellence

Diverse Thinking - The Key to Successful Product Development 

Ayman Sayed, President and Chief Product Officer, CA Technologies

Organizational success and a company culture that promotes collaboration and innovation inherently incorporates diverse thinking, approaches and skill sets. It is a balance of doers, thinkers, idea makers and idea finishers that creates the most innovative development teams.

Saying a company is diverse and behaving that way can be very different things, and diversity of thought and approach is how new ideas come to life. At all levels, and all functional areas, diversity of thought, approach and sharing of experiences is often how teams get to outcomes and conclusions faster. In an engineering environment, much like diversity in other business functions, it is important to acknowledge new people, voice and cultures that can offer new ways of thinking and views of the external world.

Diversity is a catalyst to innovations and the creation of new ideas through collaboration. It is important for organizations to foster diversity through corporate programs and initiatives that cultivate and encourage diverse thinking and bring new perspectives.

The rate of change in the technology industry requires a closer look at the people and skills to continue ongoing innovation. Agility, flexibility and increasing complexity of modernizing IT are accelerating the need for companies to approach hiring, recruitment and retention efforts in new ways – while accommodating the changing habits and practices of the emerging workforce.

“Future of IT is no IT” requires technology skilled workers to broaden beyond siloes of expertise. Automation, Analytics, DevOps and OpenSource require programmers who are just as good at reusing code as writing it and knowing how to apply programming principles throughout the stack. The IT domain in 2030 will evolve out of today's agile practices and professional services models.

It is essential that organizations develop a generation of leaders who are exposed to and have experience greater than a single role. This allows leaders to complement their existing skills and experience with a broader knowledge base in decision making to make sure that we think for the good of the company, beyond job, function or group.

The future success of any organization depends on the ability of employees to adopt and lead teams, leveraging the trends that accelerate a business. This ensures that companies develop and deliver the solutions that support customers, and drive ongoing innovation, continuously shaping the future of enterprise software.