"I don't want technology to be a constraint": Why The Very Group is shifting to microservices

It's no longer a surprise to hear about sweeping digital transformation programmes.

Even before the pandemic, being in the cloud made so much sense; and the last two years have forced even the last legacy holdouts to come to terms with the need to modernise.

It's less common to find a find a company that already operates online starting a transformation journey, but that's exactly where e-commerce retailer The Very Group has found itself: at the start of a planned three-and-a-half-year programme to modernise its IT stack.

CIO Matt Grest, who joined Very in December 2020, says the point of the transformation isn't to cope with today's challenges, but to prepare the organisation for its next phase of growth.

"A tech platform is never done, right? Our platform right now is absolutely optimised for stability, security, and scalability. It works, there's nothing wrong with it, and I think that needs to be said; it enabled us to have our best year of trading last year.

"However, if we want to continue to move at an ever-increasing pace, in terms of presenting our customers with new experiences, slicker experiences, bringing in augmented reality, recommendations, personalisation, we've almost got to be a step ahead all the time. What does tomorrow's technology platform need to be to facilitate that sort of stuff?

"So that's the journey that we're on, because I don't want the technology platform at Very to be a constraint on the business. I want it to be in a position where it can unleash the potential of the business."

It's impossible to predict what the demands on the platform will look like three or five years ahead, but the point of the transformation isn't to cope with a specific technology or scale; instead, The Very Group wants to build a flexible architecture that will help it to move in any direction it needs to.

Legacy applications struggle to reach the levels of agility that Grest envisions, so the first part of the transformation is in rearchitecting an infrastructure that has grown organically over the last decade to one built on microservices and containers.

"There's nothing wrong with a monolithic platform, but it can inhibit the velocity that your business can move at. You make this little bit of change over here and potentially there are unforeseen consequences over there because the whole thing is so tightly coupled; whereas separating it out into a much more modular system enables you to empower individual teams. [You can tell people,] 'Just go to work on that thing,' knowing that they're not going to have unforeseen consequences on that thing over there; you can sort of contain that blast radius."

The Very Group is now eight months into the project, and from a technical point of view all is going well. It will come as no surprise to anyone who's looked at recruitment in the last year, though, that the major challenge is access to talent.

"All organisations now are either doing a digital transformation or their second digital transformation and investing in the technology, which is presenting an extremely high demand that's exceeding the supply on the tech market."

Emphasising the scale of the problem, Grest says, "You could plop 50,000 new technologists into the UK tech market tomorrow and they would all get a job by Monday, such is the demand."

There are ways to mitigate the issue. You could lean into the remote working revolution and give staff the freedom to work where they want, when they want. Not only will this make you an attractive prospect for job seekers, but it's likely to boost retention, too. The Very Group has been doing this for some time, and Grest says "100 per cent" of people value the hybrid approach.

Another approach is to look internally for IT staff, as well as at brand new starters.

"We're tackling this [recruitment challenge] head-on. It's not going to go away anytime soon, so a positive progressive organisation needs to work out what they're going to do about it.

"We're investing heavily into our own talent creation programmes and creating our own talent, be it grads, apprentices, career returners, et cetera, et cetera. We know we're going to need that constant pipeline of new, eager people at the start of their careers to come into our organisation."

Recruiting or training new people who understand and embrace IT's opportunities will be key, because in any modern firm technology is no longer just a supplier to the business; it is, or should be, at its heart. As Grest says:

"At some point we'll stop using the word digital because it'll just be normal. Everything's digital, isn't it? It's not this new-fangled thing anymore… Digital is the new normal rather than the future, now."