Having morphed into somewhat of a buzzword in the business world, it can be easy to feel like you don’t fully understand what ‘digital transformation’ actually entails. To that end, we spoke to Cathal Mac Donnacha, a front-end web developer at Avaya, to find out more.
‘Digital transformation’ is a term that is bandied about so frequently these days that it’s easy to lose sight of what it really entails.
Digital transformation is really just a matter of businesses responding to the rapid march of technological progress and adapting their business models accordingly. As those in the business world are aware, periods of seismic change can tend to have a watershed effect and, very simply, no one wants to get left behind.
This is why they come to businesses such as the Santa Clara-headquartered Avaya, which offers an entire suite of technology solutions to businesses hoping to get with the times.
Cathal Mac Donnacha is a front-end web developer at Avaya’s premises in Galway, one of the company’s many global outposts. In his work, he’s at the forefront of delivering these client solutions, and so we decided to ask him what his day entails.
In many ways, Mac Donnacha’s role (like most jobs) contains many of the boilerplate tenets of a working day: there’s meetings, checking emails, reviewing daily tasks and figuring out how best to prioritise them.
Yet for Mac Donnacha, what is unique about Avaya is the autonomy and freedom it offers employees. “They really encourage you to come up with your own creative and innovative ideas,” he said.
“Even when you’re developing your own features, you get to suggest and give your own opinion – it’s valued here.”
With that freedom, however, comes the responsibility to keep abreast of the latest trends. There simply isn’t an option to rest on one’s laurels when keeping pace with the latest developments in the computer science sphere.
“You really have to keep up with the latest trends and technologies [such as] React JS … That’s really taken off now and that’s something that we’re going to maybe look into. There’s also Vue and the latest Angular 6.
“Over the past couple of years, we’ve moved [to] Agile so that really gives us a lot more freedom to develop features much faster too and get feedback from customers. Before, you’d have to wait for a part to be released … [it] really helps us and it’s a lot more rewarding, too.”
To view our interview with Cathal Mac Donnacha in full, check out the video above.
Want to work at Avaya? Check out the Avaya careers page for current vacancies.
