Transforming Midmark into a Modern Software Delivery Organization

Gone are the days when Information Technology (IT) was just a single person at a small company or a small department at a large corporation. Or being a vice president of IT meant you most likely worked at a tech company in Silicon Valley.

Digital transformation and acceleration have graduated from competitive advantage to corporate necessity. In fact, IT today plays a pivotal role in driving company growth, with many companies incorporating it into their growth strategies.

Much of this can be attributed to the Internet of Things (IoT) continuing to transform how we interact with machines, data and each other. It is bringing a new level of connectivity that delivers efficiencies, automated processes and insights through data analytics.

At Midmark, we are currently going through our own digital transformation, investing in the infrastructure, resources and talent to adopt a more digitally-focused approach in addition to our manufacturing expertise.

As the company’s vice president of information technology, this has been an incredibly eye-opening and rewarding experience. I’ve seen first-hand how this transformation has energized our teammates in our IT group. The group has become much more creative and empowered when solving problems. They feel invested and realize their work is now directly connected to our mission of serving our healthcare customers.

To understand our position in the healthcare digital landscape and continue delivering value to our customers, we had to change our thinking completely. We are identifying those digital services and connected solutions we can provide that can enhance the

experience between patient and caregiver and the delivery and quality of care provided.

As part of our digital transformation, we are evolving our IT group into a modern software development and delivery organization that will give us the agility to operate, support and build software within the company while keeping up with the pace of change.

The speed of what we need to create and adapt from a digital standpoint for our customers is much greater than traditional physical product management, where the life cycle and lead times can be measured in years. With software and firmware, you need to be able to develop new capabilities and offerings weekly, quarterly, or even daily at times.

A big part of our organization focuses on the IoT connectivity platform between our physical products and our digital customer experience. We no longer just focus on back-end operational software but also the digital product development that our customers experience and utilize.

This required adapting how we approach product and quality management and how our traditional engineering team thinks about software and firmware. We’ve also had to blend our Research and Development (R+D) and IT so they can work more closely together when it comes to digital product development.

In addition, we evolved our software delivery methodology. Initially, we shifted from our waterfall methodology approach, a sequential development process, to a scrum software delivery approach, emphasizing teamwork and iterative progress toward a defined goal.

As we strived to push problem-solving and creativity down to our teams as much as possible, we realized that even more scale and coordination was required to deliver value. We evolved from scrum into scale agile methodologies, which is the large-scale coordination of many teams. We shifted and changed our reporting structure and management style, pushing decision-making and creative problem-solving to our delivery teams.

This resulted in a lot of upskilling, training and hiring. We focused on our technical depth and strength, moving from an environment of generalists managing contractors to an in-house team able to quickly write, adapt and change software.

While the Midmark culture has made this transformation possible, I think going through this process has made us a better company and further strengthened our culture. Watching our IT group grow into a streamlined, collaborative organization hyper-focused on employing creative ideas and new approaches to help our customers overcome their challenges and achieve their objectives has been great.

To learn more about Midmark, visit midmark.com. ?