A journey through IKEA's digital transformation | Supriya Chitale & Björn Ramberg

Thank you. All right. Anyone here who knows who this is? Let's go for it. It's Billy. It's Billy. Awesome. Perhaps not everybody was going for hands in the air here. So maybe not everybody knows that much about Billy. So maybe we should start talking a little bit about bookcases today. Yeah, absolutely. We will talk a little bit about bookcases like, - for example, Billy here has been part of the IKEA range since 1984, - and it is a timeless piece of home furnishing. But what's also interesting and what we are here to talk about is IKEA's - digital transformation journey, - which is almost like a book in the bookcase. Yeah, you're right. And a chapter in that book should absolutely be about - a word and a value that we hold very dear at IKEA, - which is togetherness. And togetherness builds on collaboration. So maybe we should spend some time today as well talking about - togetherness, collaboration, - and what role Inner Source has played in that for us as well. Absolutely. Let's dive in. First, we introduce ourselves. Who am I? My name is Björn Ramberg. I started working for IKEA in 2017. I have around 20 years or so in the IT industry. I've been working a huge amount of different roles - through different sectors such as maritime, - telecom, and now retail. I always had a passion for technology, - new and old, retro as well. I love travel. I love to spend time with the family. What about you, Supriya? My name is Supriya Chitale and I have been - working at IKEA for three years, - moved to Sweden in 2024. Prior to that, I've been working in United States and India for many years, - 20 years in the software industry, 14 years working with InnerSource, - open source topics. I also have a 16 year old teenager back at home - and love to travel and love to learn about new things. So should we start from the beginning and perhaps with a question that many - of you are sitting here with? What does IKEA have to do with DevOps? IKEA only makes furniture, right? Well, not really, and definitely not from the beginning. So IKEA was established in 1943 in a shed, - which you can see over here in the picture, - in Elmtaryd, Småland in Sweden. Our founder, Ingvar Kamprad, - was running this out of a family farm, - and it was a one-man show selling pens and matchboxes, - among other things. Fast forward to today, - we are 220,000 co-workers across the globe in 63 different markets. And just 4,000 curious rebels out of those are working with - central digital solutions. So it's not a one-man show anymore. And regardless of the physical solutions or the digital solutions, - something that we have been passionate about in our 80-year history - is to make and to bring IKEA products to the many people. And that's why we are constantly renewing and improving to become - the world's leader in life at home. This comes from the company being driven by our vision to create - a better everyday life for the many people. That along with a strong bond for our values such - as simplicity, togetherness and renew and improve. These are not just words on the wall. These are actually fundamental to everything we do, - from how we create our products to how we interact with customers. And in reality, these are actually also words on the wall because we do have - them on all the offices around the world. We are constantly striving to become more affordable, - more accessible, more sustainable and more relevant for the many people. And that's not just for today. It's about building a better tomorrow where - quality products and great experiences are within everyone's reach. That with respecting the planet's limited resources as well. For the many people part that is - underlined here in the vision, we do mean customers, - co-workers, everyone, including the coming generations as well. So this gives us a strong sense of purpose. And when we say everyone, we truly mean that as well. From the new family furnishing their first home to our dedicated co-workers - who are bringing our vision to life and all the way to the children who are - shaping tomorrow's world and the coming generations. So as you said before, Supriya, this actually goes for both physical - in-store journeys as well as our digital experiences, right? Because of the world, how it's working today, - we all know that these are not separate experiences. These are interconnected experiences that we're doing our best - to weave together. An interesting note on all of this is that 80 percent - of IKEA's customer journeys actually start online. And this is, of course, not just fun statistics for us, - but it's also a clear message on how our customers live - and how they shop today. So this requires us to meet our customers in new and innovative ways. And we want to ensure that we provide a seamless omni-channel experience. So maybe Supriya, you want to take us through what we mean when we say - omni-channel experience. Absolutely. So our customers want a more - convenient and personalized shopping experience, - whether they're buying a new sofa or just a set of napkins or even buying - a whole new kitchen for their room. And that led us to innovate and reinvent our business. So we started our digital transformation in 2018 to make the transition from - cash and carry to customer first omni-channel shopping experience. In essence, what it means - is we want to bring to our customers a seamless shopping experience - going all the way from, - browsing a product on your phone to having it delivered to your home, - but in a sustainable and cost-conscious way. Now, so going from the traditional big blue box, - as we like to call the IKEA stores, - where you have physical access to the entire IKEA range, - we now also have city stores and smaller formats. And a lot of effort has gone into developing remote shopping - experiences for our online customers. What do you say, Björn? Do you have any personal favorite among our new - ways in which we are trying to meet our customers? You know what? I do. Ikea Kreativ. Let's have a look at that, shall we? All right. So by combining - decades of IKEA life at home knowledge with the latest - developments in spatial computing and AI, - we're able to democratize home design with something like IKEA Kreativ. And by that, we're bringing room designing into everyone's hands and - making home transformation accessible to all. By just using your phone, customers can capture - their own room with IKEA app and design it. Doing so by adding IKEA products, - even removing existing furniture or objects as you wish. And just with a few taps on the phone as well from the existing IKEA app. Virtually erasing your old sofa and trying out a new one in real time is - really remarkable. When you're done, - you are actually going to get a list of all of the products that you use. You're going to get the cost for them. And with one tap of the button, - you're going to get a shopping cart filled up with them as well. So this is actually pretty cool. If you haven't tried it out already, - then you absolutely should. It's one thing to hear us talk about it here today - and to see it here, but to see your own kitchen or your own - living room transform before your eyes is truly something else. This is also part of our renewing and improving. There is a common thread in us coming all the way from selling pens - and matchboxes to today's AI-powered IKEA Kreativ. From the paper catalogs of yesterday to literally redesigning your home through - your phone screen today. So maybe, Supriya, you want to take us through - the journey that's been behind the scenes - leading up to where we are today. Yes, and the digital transformation - had a major role to play in this journey. So the challenges that our founder, - Ingvar, must have had in 1943, - selling matchboxes, may have been different. But our values have remained the same. And so we tried to apply the same values and same thinking - to our digital transformation. Our goal has always been to make IKEA products available - and also affordable to as many people as possible while staying true - to the IKEA spirit and values. The digital transformation which we started in 2018 was not just - an IT project that we were trying to do, - but it was a fundamental shift in how we delivered digital experiences - to our customers. So knowing that we needed to modernize our ways of working and - modernize our thinking, we introduced some new concepts. But it was challenging because it was kind of... - ... fixing the engine of a plane while you're still trying to fly. So we still had to keep serving our customers while making changes - to the way in which we were delivering our digital experiences. So we introduced the concept of DevOps product teams with each team - focusing on having a set scope and a specific capability to deliver. For example, one team can be focused on order history or another would be - working on, let's say, - the online shopping experience or, - the checkout for your online shopping experience. And all of these teams were set together in what we call domains - with each domain focusing on specific part of the business. So we have the customer domain, which is focused on - the customer journey. We have the fulfillment domain, - which is focused on order fulfillment part of the supply chain and so on. Every domain has a critical part to play in the entire customer experience. Yes. There we go. That approach is quite a common approach to splitting up - organizations in domains or areas like that - for larger companies, of course. But if we double click into the picture from the previous slide, - looking at the product teams here, - there are a couple of things that you want to stay on top of - as an organization. For instance, - some teams are unavoidably going to sit with more dependencies and more - external requirements to juggle than others. Some teams are always going to be low on resources in comparison to how - much work there is to do. And with set scopes and ownership, - like we are talking about here, unavoidably come silos as well. And silos, if unattended... - - are going to lead to - heavily reduced both communication and transparency - between the products. So for a team that are actually ticking all of those boxes, - this builds pressure and this can become an organizational bottleneck. In these cases, it's also rarely the best - or the easiest way to solve by just adding more resources. There is a very true law around this when it comes to adding - more manpower to a late software project. It's just going to make it a little bit later. So we needed to find a smarter way to work together, - sharing resources, sharing assets, - while also creating this transparency that enables us to better help support - and contribute to each other across products, right? So a modern collaboration enabling these aspects was a critical piece - to the puzzle. Talking about puzzles, IKEA in itself has a very large and complex structure. So we definitely needed a collaborative approach to be able to work together - with the different companies in the IKEA sphere. We needed a modern approach that was going to help us to - have high transparency, break down silos, - increase cross-team collaboration, have visibility across the teams, - and most importantly, be able to build reusable code for scalability. And one of the ways in which we were able to address this - is by using inner sourcing. And what is inner sourcing? Probably some of you have already heard about it, - but I'm sure everyone has heard about open source. Open source has been part of our and many other companies' - landscape for a really long time now. The practices, guidelines, - and structure of well-known open source projects was sort of - the springboard for our inner source movement. So inner sourcing is basically using open source development practices, - but within an organization. So it's like open sourcing, but within IKEA. So what we do is we develop proprietary software - by opening up the work within IKEA - between the teams so that everyone from the developers - to product managers within the team as well as from outside the team can - contribute to a product. Now, this looks fantastic on paper, - but a lot goes into actually achieving the desired results. So you need to have really good support throughout the organization, - different ways of working, and most importantly, - a culture shift from territorial to community-based. We have two great examples where inner sourcing has worked fantastic for us. And one is Allen, which is our developer portal. And second is Skapa, which is our design system. Right. One of the examples, - as you say, is our developer portal at IKEA, - which is named Allen, after the Allen key. Many, hopefully, draw the parallel to the IKEA Allen key, - a small but powerful tool that we use to assemble a lot of our furniture. And a quick introduction to the Allen portal is that this is a place where - service providers, the central service providers that Supriya was talking - about before, together with developers meet up, providing guardrails, - golden paths, relevant metrics, onboarding to internal tooling, etc. It's a way to provide a good developer experience and a true catalog - of our landscape. So in that way, - it's a little bit like adding an Allen key to our developer's experience in making - that a little bit more consistent, a little bit more coherent. So the question then comes, what does inner source have to do with Allen? Well, Allen was actually built with inner source in mind, - and it was established as a portal with a few principles as a grounding in that. We wanted to promote us being better at not reinventing the wheel where we - don't have to, not building from scratch where it's not super necessary, - but rather promoting using existing battle-tested - code bases and assets that we already have. We wanted the developer portal to be a platform - that is strong community engaged. And this is, of course fundamental - for the whole lifecycle of the platform. So continuous alignment between community engagement - and the development of the platform. The third part is that it needed to have transparency, - both in code and in decisions that are taken. So everything from the code itself to how we conduct meetings - around Allen Portal, - how we take decisions around Allen Portal is completely open. Open for anybody to listen in to, open for anybody to participate in internally. The portal itself builds on the open source project Backstage, - and the Allen portal itself is built completely adhering to inner source - ways of working internally. It's a small core team - that's working with the platform, - but a rather big community around it that is helping out delivering a - developer-centric product. This actually also become not only an inner source - product itself, but also a platform for promoting inner source in IKEA. A key component to Allen is actually the inner source marketplace. It's an organizational wide catalog of reusable assets that are - readily available for anybody to use. What about Skapa? So the other great example is Skapa. Now, when you visit any IKEA store, - which I hope most of you here have done, - you get a very unique but a very distinct IKEA experience. When we started digitalization, we wanted our customers to have - the same unique but a distinct IKEA experience. And so all of our digital meeting points, - like the website, - the mobile app, are developed using Skapa, - which is our official IKEA digital design system. It's basically a collection of guidelines, - design, and code that help our teams to build products that have - a very IKEA look and feel. So everything from a standard color palette, - or standard components, - or reusable graphical assets, - even down to text formatting and spacing is available. What it does is also it enables IKEA to develop products in a way that is faster, - cheaper, and at scale. But how does inner source tie in with Skapa? Now, Skapa is an IKEA-wide intercompany collaboration, - and therefore we needed a much wider collaborative approach. What we were able to do with inner sourcing was we were able to - create a shared ownership and trust between the different teams in - the different companies within IKEA. And what it has helped us to do is, - developers, for example, could directly unblock themselves by - solving bugs instead of reporting the bugs to the teams and then waiting for - the teams to actually solve it for them. What we achieved with this was speed. And in some cases, our developers were able to create UI components up - to 50 times faster. How cool is that? It is. And we, of course, think that both Allen and Skapa are really, - really good examples, but it's actually underbuilt with some interesting - numbers here as well. So starting out with Allen here. If we look at the total amount of contributors to Allen, - 95 percent of the ones that are contributing are actually - team external from the core team. That is pretty amazing, I think. There is over 50 of these reusable assets, - shared components that are available for anybody to contribute to, - to start working with a new product or to just add to and make it - even better than it was. Around 1,000 weekly users we have on the platform that is there onboarding - to tools, using the metrics, - using the guardrails that are there, etc. And of course, we have a bunch of other internal platforms as well. 30 or so of those to varying degree of integration are available there as well - for any developer to use through the same kind of lens, - so to speak. What about Skapa? We also have fantastic numbers for Skapa - with 50 plus reusable UI components, - saving developer time up to 20 to 50 percent. And the adoption that we have seen in the organization has been fantastic with - 400 percent increase in three years - and 172 million package downloads in 2024. So talk about reusability. For both of these examples, - the necessity to have collaboration as a fundamental pillar and good, - solid ways of working was the key to achieving success. And these are just two examples, but two really good examples in how - togetherness is leading the way in how we work with code. So, we are back at Billy again. As we said in the beginning, we have a lot of things to talk about, - like our company, the digitalization journey, - and how inner source ties into all of that. But we wanted to leave where we started, - and that is talking at least a little bit about bookcases. it's funny how something as simple as a bookcase - can have such a rich story to tell. Yeah, and as you recall us starting out the presentation with - the very lovely but empty Billy bookcase, - this picture here is actually the natural habitat of the Billy. This is where life happens. So a Billy isn't fully a Billy until it becomes part of - someone's story, part of someone's memories, - also passion and part of their life. Well, life happens. Really love that. And that ties in with inner source as well. Whether it's the many contributing code to a product, - digital product, or many contributing books, - precious items, and other things to a bookcase. There is a strength in the many. And it's beautiful how these parallel stories of collaboration, - digital and physical, come together. They're both about creating spaces where people can build, - contribute, and share something beautiful together. Sure is. So thank you all for listening to us here today. We hope this has given you a little bit of insight into how we're working, - our journey, and also perhaps some inspiration for how we can all - contribute to the better everyday lives for the many people. One line of code at a time or one bookcase at a time. - Absolutely. - Thank you so much.