If Sustainable IT Is Your End Goal, Don’t Treat Innovation as An Option

I am often asked by CIOs about the basis of a future-focused, resilient and customer-facing team. And 10 out of 10 times my answer is Innovation. Now coming to innovation, I have witnessed a pattern for most CIOs – for due business agility, they prioritize top-down innovation over the bottom-up approach, or vice versa.

And that’s where the catastrophe happens! As business leaders, it is essential to master the art of balancing. Integrating innovation both, from top down is as important as prioritizing innovation bottom-up.

And here, I am speaking from my personal experience of scaling development teams at my organization which led us to become the most innovative IT company of 2022. There were times in our initial days when we prioritized either of the two approaches and that backfired.

It was then that we, as drivers of growth in the organization, decided to bring in a semblance. And there was no looking back! Today if I am here talking about organizational changes as an expert, behind it is 23 years of learning and unlearning. And through this IT strategy we have gradually developed in the team the mindset to be forever learners.

As tech leaders, we must realize that professional perks are everywhere. And a good resource would feel valued only when you offer something more than what your competitors do not have on stake. In the era of socio-cultural revolution, a right IT resource values paramount learning experience over financial incentives. That’s the beauty about the feeling of inclusiveness.

This is what we have harnessed. A tribe of future-focused, innovation minded people with extreme greed for knowledge, tempered to the nook with professional upskilling, to finally become an extremely resilient and cross-functional team of trusted software development partners. And if I tell you where we stand with them now, you’ll be baffled!

Apart from driving invaluable data-driven research and innovation for our organization, these individuals are now inclined to give back to the developer community.

Since early 2000, Radixweb has been steadfast in integrating innovation into IT with transparent development practices. It was during 2012 that we felt a pressing need for quality code standards. The idea was to build an open-source architecture for web apps for the internal team to smoothen, strengthen and standardize the enterprise software development process.

We discussed this need with our top innovators and decided to design a software development standardization framework to create a uniformity of coding mechanisms in an attempt to ensure industry best practices. The core thought was to limit it to the in-house team to strengthen internal development processes against the likes of hazards like data breaches, ever-developing technology, and for ensuring code stability, code quality improvement even amidst high industry attrition rates. That’s how we built RxWeb – an open-source, clean-code architecture for web applications developed on Angular and .Net core.

However, we soon realized that the developer community could surely benefit from this framework in the areas of risk management, avoiding code errors and minimizing project rejection, thereby helping the users maintain brand reputation.

After receiving huge benefits in the development process, we decided to share this framework with the global developer community. We made it Open-Source and completely free to use. This MIT-licensed framework has over 2.5 million downloads now and is even being used by several mega corps for safeguarding their security standards.

Cut to 2021 when the Google Page Experience update was knocking on the door, we identified the need to optimize Core Web Vitals for our website. That’s when our TOGAF-certified technical architects jumped in to find a sporadic solution with a super-fast open-source framework.

Our target was to make the lives of our front-end developers easier, and we wanted to empower them for building modern stack websites with basic JavaScript knowledge. The result was a thoughtful approach – a PWA-ready static website, TezJS with guaranteed Highest Performance, Simplicity, Scalability, Best-Practices, Turbo Speed Out of the Box. This Headless Jamstack framework for modern websites simplifies building favorable digital experiences for your business.

Our tech architects ensured that complexity was thrown out of the equation by leveraging a similar approach to static web apps. They integrated Vue and combined modern technologies like TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, ViteJS, and Strapi to design simple developer experiences for building multi-lingual complex websites. And the last nail to the carving was speed – our solution enabled supreme performance and speed to enterprise CMS of 1200+ web pages, containing a plethora of modules and functionalities.

Did you know that the total energy consumption for 7.2 million data centers around the world amounts closer to 1% global electricity demand?

If one request sent by users creates 5kb of data for a particular page to load, then it’s not hard to imagine the impact generated by lakhs of requests processed by servers.

One of the core thoughts apart from positive developer experience, was to minimize this carbon footprint globally. And using our open-source framework, we minimized electricity usage because it helps web fronts load only 30% at the first time – which saves significant energy. We have a live example of having 99 percent performance even on mobile, and LCP is lesser than 2!

Our own website is the first live project of this fabulous JS framework with over 1400 pages on site. And we were overwhelmed to be declared 95% cleaner than most other websites tested for carbon footprints. After testing the framework on ourselves, we made it open-source and free for developers around the globe, so that businesses and developers around the world could make use of it. As a tech innovator and facilitator for growth, this tops the list for me of our most commendable achievements.

Wrapping upIt is only through a culture of constant learning and practicing passion-led innovation that we have reached a stage where we can extend the fruits of our achievements with developers around the world.So, never fall into the trap of thinking that innovation is optional.It never is!