Editor’s note: IT leaders have quickly shifted gears to enable remote working and overcome unplanned technology and business challenges in the weeks following the COVID-19 outbreak. The Enterprisers Project is documenting their stories and celebrating IT team wins in an ongoing series. John Lilleyman, CIO of STEMCELL Technologies, shares his IT team win below.
The challenge:
STEMCELL Technologies, a global biotechnology company that develops specialized cell culture media, is currently playing a critical role in helping research scientists in the fight against SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19. The company implemented a work-from-home policy and needed a way to monitor the health, availability, and location of all employees on a daily basis. The company needed a solution that was easy to use reliable, and could be created quickly.
What we did:
Realizing the severe dangers of the pandemic, STEMCELL leadership knew that plans would need to be put in place to ensure worker safety and maintain production of specialized cell culture tools. The company turned to low-code technology to create an application that would track employee and tool availability. The application development team worked closely with business leaders to put together an app in just one day.
The team credits low-code visual development, the ability to reuse pre-built components and application templates, as well as the ability to support continuous delivery, as the key factors in the rapid development of the app, called My Status. Having collaborative tech tools like low-code ensures that organizations can quickly turn problems into solutions during times of crisis.
What we learned:
The app, My Status, helps keep 1,500 Stemcell employees safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. It helps STEMCELL maintain the production of specialized cell culture tools that are crucial for scientists to research diseases and therapies, including vaccines to combat the COVID-19 virus.
This experience underscores three key learnings for my IT team:
- Be open to new technologies, such as low-code in this case. It has the ability to not only improve the company, but also the lives of the employees that work for it.
- Speed of development is critical when facing a rapidly changing situation like the coronavirus outbreak.
- Collaboration and trust between IT and the business are crucial for success.
[ IT leaders in our community are sharing advice on navigating this crisis. Read Crisis leadership: How to overcome anxiety. ]
