A strategic step from SIM card to device; the bank’s affordable smart phone offering extends its already successful mobile strategy Truly mobile banking The first bank in South Africa to run a mobile network now also offers its own branded smart phones to low end consumers for whom “every cent counts”. Easy access to its powerful …
This year we added a “Learn” component to Codefest; even ninjas need to upgrade their mastery. Ernst and Young highlights talent as one of five strategic imperatives in their latest report “Leading through innovation; The future of banking in emerging markets”. High quality IT talent is particularly scarce in banking and industry winners will be able to attract …
FNB recently hosted a trip for 2 hackathon-winning students from Africa’s first peer to peer coding education academy. Stephen Asiedu and Sizwe Mamba come from very different backgrounds but they have two things in common. Firstly; as WeThinkCode students they beat 30,000 other hopefuls to make it through the rigorous assessments and secure a place in the first ever …
Technology continues to drive job creation in South Africa. Eight of the eleven finalists in this year’s FNB Business Innovation Awards make direct use of innovative IT in their products and services. From NicheStreem’s digital streaming platform to Guidepost’s software platform for disease management, software offers the game-changing industry disruption that all of these techpreneurs have …
Anthony Hugo, a software programmer from RMB made this comment at last year’s event; it shows why the new models of motivation really work. Autonomy, mastery and purpose; these are the intrinsic factors of true motivation that Daniel Pink proposes in his excellent book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”. He also argues …
Technical craftsmanship must be co-located, showcased and rewarded to achieve real breakthroughs; spaceflight and banking are no different. NASA employs the brightest people on this planet so we can learn about other planets and even land on them. Elon Musk personally phones the top grads from Harvard, Yale and MIT to lure them into his …
FirstRand is hosting this crucial industry event on September 29th; it promises to make a valuable contribution to the growing community of DevOps practitioners in South Africa. The concept of a regular DevOps Africa conference was conceived by Josef Langerman of Standard Bank in order to create a platform for the local DevOps community. Standard Bank …
Africa DevOps Day 2016: Building skills for the next generation Read More »
The well known 4 social styles model is useful to understand “how” you interact with people; you can also use this model to describe the “what” of IT to different stakeholders. Driver, Expressive, Amiable and Analytical – these are the 4 behavioural styles that explain how people interact with eachother. Many leadership courses teach this interpersonal model to improve relationships, especially in …
Social Styles and IT: Beyond personal interaction Read More »
The coolest IT sprint in the FirstRand Group is going to new heights this year; join us to build, learn and share your cool stuff. At last year’s October codefest over 250 developers built 42 apps in a 6 day sprint from business ideation through to an intense dragon’s den including the FNB and RMB CEOs (see the …
The Agile Manifesto is not the 10 commandments, it’s principles; much like 50 shades of kid’s parties…. what? Software development is essentially a creative process requiring far more social psychology than many development methodologies allow for, even Agile ones. Some thought leaders argue that Agile software projects are like complex adaptive systems (CAS); related agents interacting in an environment of continually changing conditions. …
Being agile at becoming Agile, child's play right? Read More »
