Evolving Our Tech & Talent

Written by Raghav Pavaman , Senior Vice President, Engineering, Relias

Taking the road less traveled is turning out to be exciting for us here at Relias. After several acquisitions and a period of rapid growth, the inherited platforms in place made the Relias Learning Management Platform into a distributed monolith. It is complex, brittle, expensive to scale, and very difficult to update or improve with new features and capabilities. Furthermore, recent studies show that the healthcare industry is looking to technology to address challenges. Our State of Healthcare Training & Staff Development Report showed that the use of a learning management system (LMS) for tracking training rose from 47% in March 2020 survey to 57% in 2021. Additionally, the follow-up COVID-19 survey we conducted in June 2020 indicated that 24% of respondents had adopted an LMS during the pandemic.

All of this drove why we decided to modernize Relias applications and their platform infrastructure as a part of our digital transformation strategy. Leveraging?Bertelsmann's strategic partnership with Microsoft, we are spearheading a phased approach where we are adopting Cloud-Native Technologies and Continuous Delivery best practices. The goal is to endow the business with shorter lead times and on-demand delivery capabilities.?

Both Relias and Microsoft are on a mission — Preparing the Relias enterprise to converge on a modern technology ecosystem. At the core of this partnership, we empower the platform engineering workforce with the right tools, taking advantage of automation and innovation culture.

Transformation Strategy – A Phased Approach

We are also embedding security controls and data protection throughout the development process and taking a thoughtful approach to modernizing applications and platform infrastructure guided by Microsoft Azure's Well-Architected and Cloud Adoption Frameworks.?

The blueprint of our modern application architecture — an outcome of the initial phase — is Microservices-based with the benefits of API Security and Management and a Unified User Identity and Access Management solution.?Phase 1 also provided a big picture of various components we would need to build to help us migrate from a monolithic architecture to a microservices architecture.

The road to the Phase 1 outcome was challenging, exciting, and uplifting. Here are some of the key wins we walked away with:

1. We segmented the monolith into multiple bounded contexts to improve scaling and give our teams the ability to deploy their code into production independently.
2. We designed a North-Star Target Architecture to provide a long-term architecture direction with transition steps needed to implement microservices.
3. We evaluated and selected Azure technology solutions such as Azure Active Directory B2C for authentication and access control, API Management to provide Partner APIs to our strategic business partners, and Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) as a modern DevOps tool to automate the microservices' deployment.

As an organization, we are passionately excited about Phase 2 which will focus on the transition architecture implementation.

In Phase 2, we will implement a set of fundamentals needed to perform microservices-based services. The main components will be:

1. Unified Identity Management?— To provide a single way to connect all our users to Relias platforms
2. Azure Cloud Foundation Enhancement?— To better utilize Azure cloud and enhance security
3. API Management?— To provide a gateway to our partners and build our first set of microservices prioritized by the business

Following the Microsoft cloud development principles and frameworks, our modern application design approach will improve the velocity of new feature delivery, exposing application functionality via APIs, decoupling of components and services developed, and building a future-proof elastic cloud infrastructure.

Transforming Tech, Empowering Teams

Without question, this kind of transformation isn’t easy. But we’re pursuing this initiative because it’s what is best for our clients, and ultimately, for the patients they serve. We feel confident that we are going to write a success story based on constant adaptation and change. Because at Relias, change is a part of our everyday commitment to improvement, innovation, and creativity. We challenge ourselves to adapt and evolve to match the needs of landscape in front of us.

Because at Relias, change is a part of our everyday commitment to improvement, innovation, and creativity.

To complement the technology transformation, we are in the process of adopting the empowered teams model that is helping us adopt a product-centric mindset. This model encourages leaders and managers to?empower, inspire, motivate, and support the people they lead and manage.

With empowered product teams, we enable people to?solve hard problems in ways our customers love that also work well for the business. They brainstorm ideas and techniques to discover solutions that are valuable, usable, and viable.

To solve hard problems, the Relias product teams are empowered with the business context that comes from leadership — especially the product vision. This vision is the shared objective for the product organization, product strategy which lays out a plan?for accomplishing our product vision, product principles that reflect the values of the organization, and product priorities that point out what is most important to our customers.

Managers have a crucial role to play. They support the product teams with ongoing coaching, and ensure that teams have a clear and relevant set of quarterly objectives. The objectives spell out the problems the teams are being asked to solve. The product teams are held accountable to deliver business results (outcomes), rather than shipping features (output).

This empowered teams model has already started bearing fruits for Relias, and we expect improved productivity and continuous innovation.