Entelect’s Retrospectives
Retrospectives looks back at highlights from our year in the technical and solution-focused landscape, and the initiatives that drive our culture.
2020 has been an interesting year, to say the least. With the adjustment to working remotely, limiting physical interactions, and health and safety being a key priority, we have seen some interesting changes as we continued to deliver valuable solutions to our clients and their businesses.
Over the years, Entelect has become a multi-national, end-to-end technology solutions provider, housing 800 professionals spanning 3 continents, and serving clients in diverse industries and geographies. Our multi-disciplinary teams have embraced the challenges of 2020 with empathy and pragmatism and harnessed technology to create certainty where there was little.
Moving from collocated environments to working remotely overnight has been a drastic shift for organisations across the globe. But through this process, we’ve learned valuable lessons in how to promote smart decision-making, productivity and culture. Learn more about this in our publication on working remotely.
Collaboration is key for our teams both in day-to-day work, as well as stakeholder interactions, usability testing, and general feedback sessions. Communication and team engagement increased during the year with teams leveraging Microsoft Teams and Zoom as their primary collaboration tools. Remote whiteboarding and visual collaboration have spurred the use of Miro, with a minority of teams using OneNote in real-time.
From a technology standpoint, the staple programming languages like C# and Java have seen little change in popularity. However, for web development, there’s been a steady decline of JavaScript usage with an increased interest in TypeScript – indicating that teams seem to have an affinity for strong typing and object orientation.
We have seen a drastic uptake in the number of data lake projects to centralise and consolidate data in guiding business decision making and product ownership. SQL usage has also been climbing which coincides with businesses adopting the approach of data-driven decision-making.
Cloud computing has been a consistent area of interest over the last few years with expanded migration in 2020. There’s been a slight decline in on-premises infrastructure and a significant uptake in Azure adoption. The vast majority of teams have either migrated most components to the cloud or have a full migration plan being executed on.
Although the tools and technologies help us solve problems, it’s our people that make it happen. We value our culture and the initiatives that have thrived through it. This year saw our internal conference, DevDay, continue virtually and expand globally, with two events featuring Scott Hanselman and Troy Hunt. The Entelect Challenge grew in participation as we awarded over R200 000 in prizes to the community at Comic Con Africa. Our Tech Accelerator programme saw some innovative ideas, including COVID-19 sanitisation technology, and smart ambient lighting for games and movies.
2020 tested our mettle, and ultimately we’re left feeling vindicated by the emphasis our culture places on the value of strong personal relationships throughout our teams and customers. These relationships more than anything else enabled us to adapt and thrive. We look forward to 2021, and all the new challenges and triumphs it promises.
- Rishal Hurbans: Solutions Architect at Entelect