00:00:10

Next up is a team from Siemens Karsten. Speece is head of R and D of team play the digital ecosystem platform at Siemens Healthineers. And Peter Fastbender is principal key expert at Siemens ag. This is such an exciting presentation for me, partially because it is in the healthcare industry and industry that we were seeking more experienced reports from. They will describe the internal partnership to bring digital transformation to Siemens healthcare. Another horizon three initiative Carston will scribe how their work is enabling the creation of new capabilities to healthcare providers leveraging the internal consultant capabilities of Peter's organization. Peter will also describe the Siemens career track for individual contributors and experts. Please welcome Karsten and Peter.

00:01:01

Thank you very much, Jean, for providing the opportunity to present here at the U S London this year, and thanks to the complete Ituri evolution team for making this virtual event a reality. Our talk today is about how we leverage continuous delivery and dev ops approaches to stay competitive in a highly regulated market. We have two presenters today. I will cover on the first part more the general dev ops aspects across the company of Siemens. And in the second part, we'll give you some insights into a concrete example in health, Cynthia, I am a principle expert for PLM process innovation, Siemens Advanta consultant. I have over 15 years Hancock's experiences. We need an agile and since four years, and one of the key drivers of the decimals transformation within Siemens.

00:01:53

My name is Costin Spiess. I'm responsible for the R and D department of team play and Siemens heads in years. And I have around 20 years of experience in software development.

00:02:06

Why is a company like Siemens adopting continuous delivery and dev ops approaches? As you probably know, we are a very large company. We have 385,000 employees today and our revenue of 87 billion Euro. We are structured into five companies, smart infrastructure, digital industry, Siemens energy, Siemens mobility, Siemens Healthineers, and a few supporting corporate departments. Cross-cutting customers is with Siemens Healthineers and I'm with Siemens Atlanta, part of copper technology, which is cross cutting across all the companies and with the aim to support all the companies and the business units within them. We are a company with a history of 170 years now, and we have a history of very physical product. We have a lot of heavy metals, so to speak. So again, why do we care about frequent software updates? It's not because it's cool or because it's fancy because they have the latest tools out there we like to play with because it Googles Netflix alike at doing it.

00:03:17

It's because the world is changing. Our world is changing our Siemens portfolio. Our market is changing significantly. This is quite a big change. That's happening at the Mellon at two keywords here. One is digitalization, meaning increase or the relevance of software in our portfolio, in our products, we have new cloud-based offerings products popping up in all our business units. We have mobile apps which become a critical part of many of our applications. We have a lot of on-premise software applications, and we have a lot of embedded software and all our, most of our physical systems. So the whole arena of the software is constantly increasing, has been already for many, many years, but this is really increasing at a constant pace and becoming one more important, meaning more and more features, more and more customer value is realized in software. The second key word here is connectivity.

00:04:22

Of course, if you run a cloud solution by ourselves, we by default have connectivity to this product, but also for our on-premise software and physical embedded products, we have a tremendous amount of content NEC activity already today. And also this is constantly increasing. And then if you take in here, a few of the other things like big data analytics, AI, deep learning, digital twin, a lot of these modern digital technologies technologies, you realize that our whole portfolio in many, many areas is shifting towards a new direction. And if you look at this more closely, you realize that frequent software updates are possible for many, many of these scenarios that I just described in here and more over there are not only becoming possible, but they're also becoming mission critical because they're becoming really relevant for us to stay competitive in these markets. Let me give you some examples of typical applications scenarios within our industry.

00:05:31

Starting on the left, we have as mentioned a lot of new cloud-based offerings popping up in all of our business units. And I think it's obvious that if you run a cloud-based solution, customers are expecting today that you really constantly improve this and you don't only run a yearly update or these as maybe in the past on more classical products, we also have a lot of data driven value added services, so to speak remote services based on data analytics that you can do in order to provide additional value to the customer. And again, on this case, we could try to build the perfect product spending two or three years developing it, or the much better approach is to establish a minimal market or product the customers can already use. And then step by step on a continuous basis, increase the functionality, makes us a better product, add more models, add more value to the customer, uh, and thereby increasing the user experiences based on frequent regular enhancements of this product.

00:06:37

Or do you also have the on-premise devices? And although in this case, if we have the capability for frequent releases, we are in a position to also do targeted advancements of these devices, either on a regular basis or on a demand basis, depending on the scenario. And then there are things like big data analytics platform, where we have a lot of business applications on top of it, which are coming from the various vast amount of different businesses we have across the different companies we have within Siemens. And there, I think it's also clear if these application they want to evolve and they have additional demands on the data analytics platform. And therefore we need to be in a position to evolve this data analytics platform at a high pace was very frequent updates in order to meet these demands of the business applications, depending on it.

00:07:34

And they are things like AI based assistance also increasingly used within our product. We all know that AI AI algorithms are innovating very fast these days. And in order to benefit from these fast advancements, we also need to continuously have a exchange between implementing those new algorithms, improved agro misses in production, learning from them, feeding the, uh, learning spec to the development, and then continuously increasing. If you would only do this on a yearly cycle, our learning curve would be very, very flat, but if you're in a position to do it on a bi-weekly basis, for example, we have a much steeper learning curve, which is really crucial in order to utilize these new technologies for our, and for our customers' benefit. And we have totally new digital businesses where we really want to use experiments in production to explore the real customer needs and audit to give us the right direction to evolve these new businesses in the right direction for all of these scenarios.

00:08:37

Also, they are different in some sense, they all have in common that they benefit from the application of continuous in delivery delivery and dev ops approaches because we need these frequent updates. I would even go one step further. They really depend it. We won't be successful in these markets if we are not in a position to really have these approaches technologies in order to increase the frequency of our updates. But applying those approaches in a company like ours is quite a significant change can be best in if you look at where we're coming from for the last 30, 40, maybe even more years in a industrial company like Siemens and a large complex organization, everything was kind of optimized based on this project approach, I would be six, 12 or 18 months project, and this doesn't only affect the R and D. It also affects all the interfaces downstream to operations, to phase two service departments also to adjoining supporting function, set services like patent analysis teams, like technical documentation business admin administration on so on.

00:09:52

So if you really want to move from this project page approach to continuous value stream, like the key ma mantra is stop thinking, purchase, start thinking continuous value stream. It really has a huge, significant impact on many, many aspects, which should not be underestimated. In our case staffer. We created this picture. We typically use when we trigger the awareness for the scale of this change. One point in here is on the left-hand side, that is you could have seen probably from the different scenarios I already described. There are different applications, scenarios for dev ops, continuous delivery approaches within our businesses. They are all moving kind of in the same direction, more frequent updates, feedback loops, higher degree of automation, but the concrete implementation is different though. The first step is really to understand where we want to go in a certain business in a certain portfolio arena, depending on, is it regulated non-regulated on-premise cloud, and then really to get aware of what is the desired target state.

00:11:01

For example, in three to five years, we want to reach. Then we really have to look at starting from the business model, how do we interface with our partners, what our customers concern on this topic. We need to work on the processes, especially things like the release processes have to be really work. We also have to talk about roles and responsibilities. We have new tasks coming from the cloud operations topics. We have to, who's doing what, how are our regions involved, how we are running field service in all this context. And of course, as also the technological part where we need to think about a delivery pipelines, we need to think about cloud technologies, but also software architecture. For example, having a stronger decoupling between safety relevant and non-safety relevant parts in our product, then we could for, uh, enhance the frequency of the non-safety relevant at a much higher speed than possibly the safety relevant parts. And all of this of course has to be complemented by a transformation transition program. Approach. Change management was a strong emphasize and also tracing the cultural changes. This is really a big thing we're pushing here. I think it will keep us busy profile the next couple of years. Uh, but we are strongly confident and convinced that this is the right direction we need to move to because our world is changing. Therefore we need a changing product development. So Carsten, can you give us some insights on how this transformation is managed at healthiness?

00:12:43

Thank you, Peter. Yes. So we in Siemens Healthineers have also have a long history in product development. It all started back in the 18 hundreds with the famous Mr. Cannes and the first industrially manufactured x-ray unit, and has now grown into various businesses, such as medical imaging with computer tomography, magnetic, resonance, tomography, um, x-ray and ultrasounds, as well as laboratory diagnostic and point of care testing, um, and heads care it as well as solutions for digital services. Meanwhile, we are a global company and the market leader in the majority of our businesses. Um, we are more than 53,000 employees globally and an installed base of around 600,000 medical devices. But the impact our teams generate is better described with another number. And this is more than 240,000 patients all around the globe. Get in touch with our products These days. Um, digital transformation is a big topic in healthcare and therefore also for our product development. One of the answers to the digital transformation, digital transformation challenge in heads care is team play digital health platform, a platform build to transform the way healthcare professionals get access to latest and greatest software innovation.

00:14:39

Back in 2014, we started to develop team play digital health platform mainly to enable our self to efficiently build new digital services in the area of operations management, clinical decision support, and patient management. Let me give you two concrete examples. One is template insights, the service and the operations management, which turns huge amounts of data in radiology into insights and provides interactive data analytics visualization. Another example is AI read companion, a clinical decision support solution, which helps radiologists to interpret medical images with the help of AI. Over the last six years, we have grown the team play digital health platform into a comprehensive platform tailor made for healthcare. Meanwhile, we even opened it to partners and we are proud that other med tech companies and startup have decided to use team play, to build and operate their solutions.

00:16:01

Why are developing team play? We actually started to transform the way we develop, deliver and operate software. We switched from developing products into developing services, um, and actually a software developer these days. And our team was, this has to really think about how to operate the service in production. And we all together learned how to apply continuous monitoring, um, to our services and even looking at constant utilization of them. We changed from long running software development projects to short release cycles. Um, in the past software development project within Siemens Healthineers, um, took around one to two years now with team play. We have this three months, um, mainline cycle, um, to production to achieve this. We also shortened feedback loops and introduced new feedback loops into our development process. Um, this starts of course, with unit testing and goes down all the way to real customer feedback via, um, integrate into our processes and very, very important. And one of the key success factors to the whole journey, um, is to make teams of product managers, software developers, and, um, implementation and, um, operations engineers to work together. Um, this, we can see, we go together to customers, um, to get their feedback together. We do trade fairs and I can really say if I joined the office in a day, then I'm really proud that we in TMT, we are really one team.

00:18:07

As we develop in the healthcare sector, we work in a highly regulated environment and our processes need to comply the severity of regulations. So for being able to apply continuous delivery and dev ops in our domain, we were forced to tailor common practices to our needs. This is what we call continuous compliance, and it's all about being able to deliver value to customers continuously in high quality and always to comply to regulations, which apply to us for example, the needs of a comprehensive documentation of each and every individual engineering steps throughout the process.

00:19:02

So let's look, um, to customers and benefits of new digital services and continuous delivery of value. Let's take and hospital in Athens Greece. Um, the hospital is using team play applications and operations management to comply to, uh, the changing regulations in healthcare and to improve quality of care for us as patients and the patient's throughput there's team player. Of course, we provide an easy to use service to them, but with our ability of continuous delivery, um, we can incorporate customer feedback and changing regulations at a much higher speed than via used to in traditional it products. And with this, I would like to hand over back to Peter.

00:20:01

Yeah. Thank you very much Caston for providing us this insight into a concrete example. I think it's very exciting. The team player is really one of the most innovative products areas we are trying within Siemens, and I'm also quite happy, uh, that I can contribute a little bit from my role on this one. Jean asked me to also give you some insights into my role and how we are driving. Such a large topic has tremendous change across Siemens. You could say we have established kind of couple of interconnected interlinked circles. It's not an organization. It's not a heretical structure. It's more different networks. We establish all that establish themselves. And that attracting this topic forward. Like, let me walk you through them. It's by bit, we have established quite a few number of communities of practices. Some of them was in individual prisoners, others company-wide.

00:20:56

We also run large internal conference Frances on the topics of dev ops. We have a lot of awareness events where we talk about this and we have, for example, established a regular webcasts, especially in these times where on a weekly basis, we continuously deliver continuously deliver continuously delivery and dev ops knowledge to our community. We also have, of course, quite a number of pilot projects within the business units that are driving this topic forward. We have also established a company wide expert group dev ops there's representatives from all the companies that I'm heading. And we also are in regular exchange with external experts networks, like for example, on this companies or similar events. And we also have our corporate key expert, corporate development, Siemens Advanta, and these departments where we are pushing things forward more from a corporate side. And this is also my role.

00:21:59

I am a key expert for PLM process innovation. And in this context, I'm pushing forward the dev ops topics, uh, as a part of my role and the key idea behind these corporate supporting functions, corporate key experts, corporate consultancies departments is twofold. One of them is that we are running a concrete implementation improvements projects within the business within individual businesses, whereas our expertise and our best practices we can share across the whole company. We really drive, uh, current issues forward and we help to improve the businesses right away today. But the idea of the covered key experts is not only to think about improving today, but really also paving the wave for the future. So as a corporate key expert from a certain level, it's expected that you are also thought leader in your field, meaning that you really look what's behind it, what's coming up next.

00:23:01

What are new approaches? What are new methodologies? Where is the industry moving and picking up these things and pushing them across Siemens. And I think this is a strong pillar of innovation capabilities with Siemens. And what is very important is kind of the business relation between this corporate functions, corporate key experts and the business units. It's not that we are driving the topics just because they are all happy and we like them, but really the business as the business units have to pay for our services, it's like an internal consultancy and thereby ensuring that we really do the things that they gain value out of it by this model, which has been established already decades ago. It really ensures that we are not doing things just for the academic purpose of it, but really things that are of value for the business unit. And speaking about this cupboard expert role, I also have to admit that I really enjoy this cutting role.

00:24:02

I've been doing this now for over 15 years as a expert driving things across Siemens. And every day is still very, very exciting because I have to deal. I can deal. I'm allowed to deal with so many different teams with so many different business units with so many different products, scenarios, and I can create an impact there all across Siemens. So it's very rewarding every day I run this job. So Karsten, could you maybe give us some ideas on how you, as one of the business units benefit from these networks and the corporate functions here?

00:24:39

Of course, Peter, yes. It's in the business units, the benefit from the expert know-how of you and your colleagues. And of course the bandwidth and dedication you can spend together with us in putting to transformation in our projects and products. Um, additionally of course we very much like the best practice sharing, uh, within the company. Um, also in the, um, in total as humans, um, as a corporate, um, and we, this is very helpful for us and we of course use this broadly, um, was in our teams.

00:25:21

And as a closing, we want to ask you let's get in touch, let's talk about continuous delivery and dev ops share our experience, how to apply it best in regulated industries. We are especially interested in your approaches to tackle continuous compliance, um, in the tools you are using every day and in your ideas, how to take, uh, the cultural change challenge, which comes along with the transition towards continuous delivery and dev ops was this, we are looking forward to your emails or LinkedIn messages. And I like to thank you for your attention, um, to our talk. Thanks a lot.

00:26:07

Thank you also very much from my side and hope to talk to many of you soon.