Infusing expertise across the globe

Corinna, if we looked at your TEAMS contacts, who would we find there? Who are you working with in the Digital Business Unit?

ZEISS Medical Technology's digital team has grown a lot in recent years. You could almost call me and my team here in Munich — together with the team in Dublin and the CARin team in India — the "old-timers" of the group. The "newcomers" bringing additional fresh energy to the team are the former Veracity team in Temple, Texas, as well as ZEISS Digital Innovation, formerly the Saxonia team, in Dresden, Leipzig and Hungary. They've been with the ZEISS team for just a short time. And that makes our collaborative work interesting. You have different areas of expertise and approaches, and when you put them together, they form a whole. We complement each other very nicely. And that goes for our colleagues in Corporate IT as well.

And who are you working with outside of ZEISS?

The most prominent example in this context is certainly our partnership with Microsoft. There are development teams in India, for example, who are part of the project. And then we have a whole range of other external partners we work with, such as international law firms that help us with legal questions regarding privacy and how our solutions operate, and companies that specialize in comprehensive security testing, since data security is a very important issue in cloud-based solutions right now.

What in your opinion is the benefit of working with external partners? Couldn't we do all of this ourselves?

In theory it would be possible, but we need to build up new expertise and resources to do that. This is the first time that we are developing a medical product based on cloud technology. Acquiring new skills and putting together new teams takes time. So, we take advantage of the knowledge and experience of our partners, and that enables us to speed up development. Working with external partners also provides us with additional inspiration. Our partners also work with companies from other sectors, and so they are able to bring experiences from other industries into our projects.

What is it like to work in this network of internal and external partners? Isn't it challenging?

There are 150 of us now all working together to organize this project using a SAFe like approach (https://www.scaledagileframework.com/#). We've broken our development up into 10-week Program Increments. Each Program Increment has a defined business objective and begins with a 3-day planning phase. Every member of the team, from senior management to the developers, attends. There, we present the results of the last Program Increment, and then all the teams plan the upcoming increment together. This approach creates a lot of transparency, and we are able to discuss dependencies between the teams early on. I don't find this way of working challenging — it's actually motivating.

And what are you working on right now?

We are working on a digital ecosystem for ZEISS Medical Technology. Unfortunately, I can't share any details — we don't want to give our competitors any hints as to where our digital journey is headed.

Corinna, thank you very much for the interview.