Cheeky IT: Engagement And Human Experiences Drive Nando’s Tech Ambitions

Culture shift

One thing the technology drive has done is change the culture within Nando’s, specifically the way the IT team is viewed across the organisation and how the topic of ‘digital’ is approached.

“Because [AWS] is dealing with the nuts and bolts, we’re able to think about what the whole engine is doing,” Atkinson explained. “So historically tech teams only got involved in something after all the fun ideation stuff had happened and after most of the key decisions had been made.

“Because some of the granular stuff is being handled by AWS, we’re raising where we are in the conversation, we’re more upstream in the process. My role is now around the board table rather than reporting to a finance director which is fairly typical still, but especially historically.”

The message is that the IT team is now more involved in actual business decisions and is now being seen by board members as a key strategic driver rather than just a cost centre.

“I think they’re recognising that a lot of people end up working in technology functional stuff because they’ve got good problem solving capabilities, they’ve got great analytical skills, they maybe have the ability to look at problems from different angles, so why lock those skills up inside a tech function? Use them elsewhere. So yes I feel like we’re in more strategic conversations than we used to be.”

Challenges

As with any digital transformation, there are of course plenty of challenges along the way and for Nando’s they are very much in-line with wider industry trends.

Getting access to the required level of digital skills, for example, is something that many organisations are struggling with – especially in areas such as cyber security and data analytics – and Nando’s is no exception.

“We’re creating new roles that hadn’t existed in the business before and probably hadn’t existed in the world until five years ago,” Atkinson said, citing a need for software engineering and analytical skills that simply wasn’t there before.

Talent recruitment for Nando’s is all about “shaping a deeper, wider technology capability than we had before,” but the challenge it has to solve is how to “attract people who identify themselves as technologists into what they perceive as a restaurant business. We might be Nando’s but we’ve got an exciting tech story to tell.”

It’s also having to update its legacy software, referred to by Atkinson as “fixing some plumbing” and an issue that many organisations are currently working to resolve.

Despite these potential barriers, Atkinson is staying positive. “I think of it as creating possibilties,” he said. “We might not know exactly how the future looks but I certainly know that we’re no longer just a restaurant operator.

“We’re something multi-channel. How are people going to interact with us through Amazon Echo? When are we really going to get into drone deliveries? Where else are people going to be ordering Nando’s food?

“The possibilities are endless and we just need to deconstruct a lot of our legacy architecture to be ready for those possibilities.”

Quiz: The world of cloud in 2017