Making the leap from in-house development to using SaaS partners | Simo Haakana

Hello, everybody. My name is Simo. I'm from Barona. My talk is going to be more about - how we in Barona have moved away from in-house development - to this more partner-based model, - where we pick our partners and try to find good fits - to our businesses, and then to support what we do in these days. So, a bit about me, I’m Simo, - I work as an enterprise architect in Barona, - and my responsibility is to look after - our employment services, staffing related ERPs, - payroll stuff, HR systems that we offer to our staffing partners, - and then try to find the best solutions to our businesses, - that we can provide our services as efficiently as possible. I have been in Barona working around seven years, - and five of those have been internal, inside of the company, - and before that, a couple years in more a consultancy role before that. And then, my previous experience from consultancy world - is from Eficode and from Wunderdog. A bit about Barona, if not everybody is familiar what Barona is. So, Barona is a market leader in Finland in employment services, - and staffing and that kind of business area. We are really, really, really focused - on providing good solutions in this employment services - and well-being and learning business areas these days. And what differentiates us from the market - of purely staffing agencies or recruitment agencies - is that we are building very, very complex solutions with our customers - and then trying to find out the best like solution fit - that would bring customer value. And we have grown a lot in past 20, 25 years that we have been existing. And these days, our business is more this solution business - and hybrid of offering staffing and offering in-house outsourcing - and that combination of different things that we have been more of into. And a bit about the numbers, what I'm really proud of is that - we are the ninth largest employer in Finland. And that brings so much power to us - to help our customers and to help our employees to benefit. When I was looking into this topic, - I stumbled around this marketing slide from our company, - how Barona's journey moved from this employment service model - into this more strategic partner, - and when we see this kind of growth in our businesses. So, in 1999, the company was started - and moved fairly straightforward - to employment services staffing provider first years of its existence. And then, we started to bring more this specialisation - and what customers needed, - we started offering these employment services around that topic. Around 2010s, we moved to more broad scope of services. We started offering learning services and moved into wellbeing area, - business area, and this kind of workability stuff, - and work well-being services that we are these days offering to companies. And the learning side, we're doing lots of learning services in Finland, - for example, with Saranen and Arffman that are part of our Barona. And then, when I was thinking how we have evolved - technically in this company, - I tried to map this change, - how we have morphed from beginning in early 2000s. We started with the self-developed ERP - that handled everything inside the company. We were a much more simple company at that time. But we decided that we were brave and will build our own. And that's the spirit of Barona overall. And that worked really, really well. And once we got to around 2010s, - we were pushing along these technical innovations. We were launching MobileCV that formed in the Recright company - that some of you might know these days. So, this kind of video-based application of jobs - and screening and bringing these technological benefits - to the staffing and recruitment area. And we tried to stay on top of the game. Then, in 2015 around, - we started to see that the first iteration of our, - our services were already getting a bit old and moved more - to renew the existing platforms and rebuild everything. And then, the business growth and diversity came in. And in 2020s, we decided that maybe - we don't have to do everything alone and moved along. In this timeline, I find three eras or generations - that I'm going to more discuss about with you guys. So, the first generation is this growing business that we build our own ERP. We have every control, we formed this finder, - what we call the ERP, into supporting our business models - and how we saw the business moving along. We could form ourselves very specific business objects - and concepts that would support our business at that time. And that was a very huge thing to us that we did get these things working. They were working very well. They were [chuckles] serving us. Actually, I think the last parts of that ERP - were retired in 2022, around that time. So, quite a long life cycle for that kind of application. But of course, once the business grew already in this era, - we started getting these services inside our portfolio. So, maybe the biggest one would be the sales course - that we added to our portfolio or to our architecture already before 2010. And then, started building these integrations - between things that we build - and things that we have customized for us with our partners. And we were pretty early on this cloud transformation in these areas. Then, we also, like I mentioned, moved, - tried to push the technology forward - with these more modern technologies, even at that time. So, this kind of MobileCV, - you answer recruitment questions when you have the time - and then recruiters can review it and show to the end customers - that these kind of employees we would have, - what do you think, how we want to move forward, - and the saved time and then bring more this agile stuff into it - and that kind of partnership with Recright is continuing even this day. So, we are very good partners still. But yeah, then came time to renew everything. And mid-2010s, the company had decided - that now we move into microservices. We are going to start from scratch, and we will find the solutions - that will speed us into this new era of the company. Since we have already seen that this one huge monolith - didn't support us in business sense anymore. It was too strict, and most of the guys - who were initially building it had already left the company. And then, we decided that now we will push - to create a new architecture and start with the recruitment services, - an ATS and create with huge effort very good ATS service. And the mindset in our company was in that time very, very like start-up, - start-up software company. We actually separated our development a bit - from our core business at that time - and even tried to sell the Jelpp, that ATS that we created - to broader market, but that didn't take off. And then, we moved along with this kind of renewal, - and moved to the ERP and HR side. And at that stage, we started to see - that software development isn't so simple, - and replacing these ERPs with existing solution is very hard. But creating them from scratch - and thinking how you will bring the software and solution - to the next era and support future business cases, it is very hard. And we started to have some issues with the time to market, - and that started to frustrate the management of the company. And that's understandable since, if you don't know - when these huge investments start to pay off, - it's really hard to continue investing in those. Also, there was a huge crowd in the company around this time. We bought a couple of smaller companies and merged. And that brought a bit different kind of business models to our portfolio. So, these companies didn't do the employment services - exactly the way Barona did. And that brought its own restriction. And there came up some systems and services that they were using. They were not self-developed, they were entire products - that did their staffing area thing one way, - and Barona did it a bit differently. And this is the time that we started to maybe understand more - what kind of things we need from the specialisation. Around 2018, 2017, there was a huge amount - of different IT projects going on in this employment business area. And we had so many teams working on so many different things, - that it just came to the situation that nothing moved forward, - and hedging the bets that much didn't offer Barona the best experience. And overall, then we started to move - more into focusing on creating the core things ourselves. But we had a really, really good mindset that we can build this. We are the experts in this area, - and we have done this before, we can do it again - and even take more responsibility from, for example, payroll side - to our own services since we felt that our payroll partner - at that time didn't perform or didn't offer - as flexible service to us that we needed. And that mindset kept going. And we also tried to look at alternative solutions. What can we do to speed things up? We have tried quite a lot of low code practices - in this kind of speeding up the development. And we have ended up with the situation that it's also development, - and you need to know what you're doing, - even if it's not that kind of coding, but more like configuring. But overall, what from this era of the big renewals - we have really benefited is that we found out these core capabilities - that we need to have in our portfolio and our architecture. Those are identities, so we know and manage who is working with us, - who is looking for jobs from us, who we are so we can provide - the identities to access these all services that we have created, - and then focus on the data lake side - and on understanding that we have loads of data in this business area - and how to bring the benefit to us and our customers - and also job seekers and employees, - what we can do with that data and how we can improve the situations - that we just could connect the dots. And to support that data lake transformation, - we also formed a quite solid integration architecture - that can support this kind of microservice way of thinking things - and connecting different kinds of services together. But these frustrations led this SaaS transformation era - that we are currently in. So, in 2022, we had a quite honest discussion - inside of our company about what is the best way to move forward. And at the end of that discussion, - we decided that, based on a couple of good experiences - with integrating these SaaS products into our core business services, - we had found out that that can work, we can make it happen. And then, we decided that we will start focusing - on managing all the things together - and creating the best shows to our customers and our business units, - rather than building the ERPs ourselves - and sticking that I want to build a product, - but I want to provide service. So, there was a couple of years of quite intense transformation, - but we were really successful in this transformation at that time. And the thing that really, really, really provided us the capability - to move into these SaaS services was these core capabilities - that we have built up already, - and we have gained much more understanding - and were a much more robust technical organisation at that time - that we could execute this transformation quite efficiently. And there are things going on now even, - that we are moving on more this kind of partnership approach, - but this is like a constant development now for us, - and we try to find good partners that we can work together. But what as Barona we have learned from this transformation journey? So, I picked up a couple of these learnings - that I feel like at least I have been learning in this transformation era - and pushing this technical change along, - is that you want to focus on the core capabilities that you must have. And you don't have to do those things yourself maybe, - but you need to own the solution - and own the business outcomes that it might bring. And these things to us were flexible environments - or flexible setups that we can support our customers' identities - that connect everything together, that we can easily bring, - for example, a new service into our ecosystem - and connect our identities to that one and offer that to our customers - or our employees, that we can use, - and we don't have to send them emails - create a password for this kind of service, - and then create a password for that service, - and then, trying to figure it out who has done what - and why nothing is working. Then, maybe the biggest thing that I feel that I have at least learned - from this change is that understanding your own business - enables you to find the best partners for you. This must be different for each company, - you have to start discussing with your business units - and the people doing the actual job if you are in IT side, - and trying to find out what they really need and how you can support it. And then, having honest discussions with your partners. Is that going to work? Is that not going to work? And trying to get a feeling of the partner, - can you trust that what they say is sticking, - or are they just trying to sell you that, yes, yes, we can do everything? Yes, don't worry, and then, in a couple of months, nothing has happened. And then, you have much more. It's not nice to have those discussions. Why isn't this working out? Why we have this friction now? Why we didn't discuss these things beforehand? And that takes time with the partners to find out. And really, it can be big partners or small partners. We work quite a lot with quite small Finnish tech companies - that provide us services. And those discussions are quite similar to what we have, - for example, with the CRM implementation partners. You have to find this same idea of what we are doing and be able to form a partnership - that you will move this project along together, and everybody benefits. And maybe a quite obvious thing, - but if you evolve your architecture and technical capabilities constantly, - and you avoid the risk that you need to do everything at once. And I feel like this is, - it feels like very obvious thing, - but it also feels very natural when you look at some legacy service. I don't want to really touch it. I think we can do it better. And the complexity and the business reasons - that have ended up in creating that service - are always more complex than you understand in the beginning. And that's a really, really good thing to keep in mind, - that if you do small things constantly - and have good vision what you want to do or where you want to be in the future, - you can take your time and do it gradually, - that it doesn't have to be so huge and overwhelming challenge - to renew these architectures along. And I think, for example, - our more from Finder to this microservice architecture - could have handled better if we would have maybe understood this better - and try to find good integrations between the old and new world, - and understood that everything cannot change at the same time. [outro music] That's my speech. Thank you very much. [applause] [music ends]