4 Key Topics: Digital Business, Enterprise Modernization, the Metaverse, & EQengineered

Fireside Chat with EQengineered’s Senior Technical Consultant, Dakota Kim.

1. As enterprise organizations continue to transform and become digital businesses, what are the key front end development areas on which to focus to enable growth and the ability of the enterprise to compete and thrive?

In order to foster an organization’s ability to grow, compete, and thrive, teams should focus on minimizing the time to market for work they’re doing. For a frontend team, a great approach to minimize time to market and unlock that growth is by building a modular component library. If the organization is striving towards a consistent design language and shared pieces of functionality, such as a modal, custom input, or navigation utilities, building generic modular components that can be leveraged for various needs can greatly increase a development team’s throughput over time. This is especially true if you have multiple projects that all want to share a similar UI language. Taking advantage of UI component library tools such as Storybook can also accelerate the process of building these modular components as well as provide documentation for developers to better understand what tools are available.

Another area of focus for organizations undergoing a digital transformation is continuously identifying the pain points, long feedback loops, and bottlenecks in the team development process. By taking stock of the everyday processes needed to deliver pieces of work, teams will be able to identify processes that can be revisited and optimized. An example of this could be a team with multiple engineers working on several distinct features for a web application. What is the process of getting feature work into the hands of the QA team? If this team is sharing a select number of servers, you may encounter a bottleneck when coordinating how to share these servers for the QA process. An approach to alleviate this may be to move towards cloud infrastructure where features such as branch-specific preview deployments can be leveraged, removing the bottleneck and allowing for more asynchronous collaboration between the development and QA team. As these bottlenecks are removed and processes are optimized, the time to market for each piece of new feature work will decrease.

2. There is a lot of enterprise discussion about modernization. What are the key front end technology challenges being faced in today's environment and how can organizations overcome these obstacles?

When organizations pursue a modernization strategy as part of their roadmap, there are going to be a lot of changes over time. These changes may lead to challenges in the day-to-day operations for the team such as: decreased developer confidence to build, insufficient historical context, poor documentation/collection knowledge of how things work. Modernization is a journey, and in order to confidently walk that journey, it’s important for everyone to understand where things currently are, where you’d like to go, and align on forging a path to get there. Documentation can be instrumental in this journey and can help ease the pains/uncertainties of changing/evolving in stride. Documentation can take many forms. Whether it may be technical writing contained in a Wiki or README, test suites to document functionality and behavior of the software, or architectural decision records - having documentation helps teams work with confidence and understand the necessary historical context as to why things are the way they are, and how to move forward. Having robust and accessible documentation will return dividends as teams change over time.

3. What are your thoughts on the metaverse? What is your advice to enterprises trying to understand its relevance to their business? How do you suggest organizations get started and engage in the virtual world?

My first thought is ‘what exactly is the Metaverse’? There are a number of definitions going around, each a little bit different in its specifics, but they share the theme of the metaverse being ‘the next big thing’ and ‘an interconnected way we’ll work and play in the future.’  I’m of the mind that the internet as we currently use it is already the metaverse, and the industry is exploring the next generation of input and output modalities to interact with the internet/metaverse. Some companies are exploring virtual reality, others are experimenting with augmented reality through glasses as this next generation interaction modality. 

For enterprises trying to understand its relevance to their business, I recommend trying out new technologies in these emerging spaces and encouraging teams to playfully experiment to see what unique capabilities and offerings may be able to be unlocked. Trying out AR technologies on a capable smartphone or trying a VR demo at a local electronics store are great ways to see what new capabilities businesses have. Understanding the possibilities and what others are currently building is a great way to get inspired or be exposed to new and innovative concepts. For enterprises who are interested in a three-dimensional shared-presence ‘Metaverse’ experience driven by additional hardware, a key question is “What is the unique value proposition of this type of experience, and what will make users return to what’s created?” 

4. Who is EQengineered, what are EQengineered's core competencies, and what makes EQengineered unique in the marketplace?

EQengineered is a leading development, data, and design consultancy made up of talented designers, engineers, and data architects who partner with enterprises to identify goals, needs, and opportunities to deliver value. EQengineered is unique because we actively listen to our partners to build teams with the exact skills, experience, and attitude they’re looking for. Our people come from a variety of backgrounds, bringing many perspectives to the table and working with empathy. We also are a team of lifelong learners who know there is always a way to do things better, and are determined to learn how to leverage modern technologies to deliver solutions. Our curiosity and enthusiasm combined with our core values of integrity, transparency, reliability, and trust have proven to be a strong foundation for the work we do with our partners.