Telstra has provided its first major look at a product development model created by its enterprise unit called Dojo.
The telco said over the weekend that the model was launched in January 2016 “with a pilot group of three projects”.
However, it is now “rapidly reaching scale” and is “enabling [over] 150 solutions plus managing a growing pipeline of ideas and initiatives”.
Given its length of existence, remarkably few details about Dojo have made it out into the public domain to date.
What is known is that Dojo represents a “radical redesign” of Telstra’s entire product development model.
It appears to be focused around speeding up the process of getting new products to market, in part by getting teams to create minimum viable products and then improve them.
Dojo is invariably described as a path to make Telstra “more like a nimble software company, with a modular architecture, and lean and agile operations, accelerating time to market and reducing costs, and ultimately delivering highly desirable products to our B2B customers”.
The methodology is said to incorporate elements of “LEAN, design thinking, agile and DevOps”.
Dojo’s first use was by the security products team within Telstra Enterprise.
They are said to have used it “to reimagine managed security services from the ground up, ‘start up’ style”, within a period of only seven months.
Through a combination of using Dojo and co-developing with an unnamed customer, the team is said to have created and stood up “two foundation elements which will underpin all Telstra managed security services for the next five years”.
These elements are “two brand new, customer-dedicated, CBD-located, state-of-the-art security operations centres”, and a “security analytics platform based on open source technology and housed in Microsoft Azure”.
The team also created two new products - security monitoring and a retainer-based incident response service, the latter of which gives customers “priority access to Telstra’s computer emergency response team” or CERT.
It is also understood that Dojo was used in the development of a managed video as a service product, which applies video analytics to surveillance camera imagery.
Telstra said that as use of Dojo continues to expand, the telco is building a “small team” of resources that have direct responsibility for its governance and “day-to-day operations”.
In particular, the telco said it wants to ensure Dojo can “run effectively at scale” and continue to generate value.
It appears that some unnamed “service providers” presently also feed into or contribute to the Dojo methodology, though further information on this aspect was unavailable.
A Telstra spokesperson would not be drawn on Dojo, nor its inner workings, when contacted by iTnews.
