Platform factories – Transforming IT to support high frequency software delivery

Speeding up go-to-market

Kadaster is a public sector organization that gathers and registers administrative and spatial data related to property. The organization also protects legal certainty. Main customer groups are civil-law notaries, local authorities, businesses, financial institutions, and private individuals. Other responsibilities include helping with planning transport and telecom networks, maintaining the national coordinate system, and tracking energy performance certificates. Such a large scope of work requires Kadaster to have its own business application and web service development capabilities.

Kadaster reached out to Capgemini because it wanted to make improvements to its go-to-market process for new products, which lacked the speed and efficiency needed. New applications and functionalities took years to be developed and often ended up lagging behind everchanging requirements. IT infrastructure suffered errors and frequently needed additional measures related to risk management. Many challenges resulted from reliance on services using the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) model instead of an Agile approach, which could potentially provide much speedier software delivery and bring such solutions as self-service to the table.

A more flexible and agile platform

In 2014, Kadaster & Capgemini set out to transform the IT Infrastructure and improve its ability to deliver with increased efficiency and speed. The goal was to build a platform that enabled agency to deploy new platforms within a single day and be able to deploy business applications within minutes. Such a timeframe was also necessary because of legislation, with certain Dutch laws requiring such operations as property transfer to be finalized within 24 hours.

From the very beginning, the partnership took a highly collaborative approach and quickly built a strong mutual trust, where together the partners could answer each business need and jointly decide on the direction of changes.

The collaboration was based on three equally important pillars: automation, self-service, and a clear separation of concern. The responsibilities of the last one were divided between both parties, with Capgemini delivering the platform and maintaining it while the agency focused entirely on creating business value through its products.

The first pilot version of the platform was delivered in six months, and the production-ready version was finalized just three months later. Additionally, as a result of the transformation, Kadaster transformed into a product-orientated organization, delivered by 65 DevOps teams responsible for building and operating the business applications.

The final version of the PaaS solution developed by Capgemini was called Platform Factories, since all DevOps teams have their own platform instances. It offers a flexible, standardized, and scalable way to develop applications. All changes to the platforms are applied directly by using self-service.

Employees never have to wait for traditional processes, change management, and manual handovers; instead, they get to focus on their job and what they do best: building and running their applications.

Reducing costs and driving growth

Thanks to the partners combined efforts, Kadaster does not have to wait for changes in infrastructure as everything gets delivered within hours, minutes, or even seconds. Thanks to this newfound speed, they moved from around ten monthly releases to 150 software deployments per day and 400 fully automated PaaS deliveries per year.

Despite the fact that Kadaster scope of work and responsibilities have increased dramatically over the past few years, the increased speed and efficiency it now enjoys mean it is very well placed going forward. Additionally, the collaboration improved employee satisfaction within the organization and led to a strong reduction in costs (in some cases, a reduction of over 50% in platform resource costs).

Even though Kadaster and Capgemini started with a platform engineering remit, the partnership quickly grew in trust and ended up transforming the entire IT organization. Kadaster has moved from an organization with a traditional ITIL model to one with a full Agile DevOps methodology. The benefits are clear: when new infrastructure requires zero attention, leadership can focus on growing capabilities and adding value to the service they provide.