Dexcom Accelerates Digital Transformation With Contino and Google Cloud Platform
The Client
Dexcom develops, manufactures, and distributes continuous glucose monitoring systems for diabetes management. Its mission is to improve the quality of diabetes data across the globe.
Leveraging the cloud through Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Dexcom professionals concentrate on developing better software for glucose monitoring practices, providing organized diabetes data to researchers quicker, and ultimately accelerating the development of better systems for diabetes management.
The Challenge
The challenge was around Dexcom’s lack of agility from a people and process perspective, and its ability to standardize tool sets while allowing for innovation across GCP. The organization was not structured in an agile fashion, which prevented them from readily deploying to new market segments on demand.
Since Dexcom’s business is driving them to new market segments globally, Contino was brought in to assess and recommend actions and methods to facilitate a new “Agile Norm.”
The Solution
Contino was brought in by Dexcom to assess and evaluate the current state of their People, Process, and Technology structures.
Using the “Momentum Framework,” Contino took Dexcom through the “nurture phase” to understand their structure, processes and technical dependencies to baseline the environment. Contino was then able to develop a people and process model implementation plan to increase agile frameworks & scalability. This plan included Jira workflows and dashboards that provided traceability and accountability from the engineer story-level, rolling up to program-level initiatives. This plan also provided best practices on how to run meetings effectively, how to tie business outcomes to engineering work and how to be a true product owner.
Additionally, Contino assessed the current state of the platform itself and recommended ways to improve Dexcom’s GCP service provisioning capabilities. These areas included moving existing infrastructure provisioning from Github to Gitlab, moving from Terraform to Terraform Cloud for Business, consolidating existing Terraform repositories, and adding additional security policy (Sentinel) and testing (Inspec) capabilities into the existing Terraform pipelines.
A lighthouse project was delivered, incorporating several aspects of the existing GCP landing zone to better facilitate the benefits of this technology.
The Business Outcome
The Dexcom IT organization is moving forward with the recommended structure and agile transformation needed to grow its digitized strategy.
A brand new DevSecOps virtual team has been created with related workflows, processes and hiring/training strategies. Additionally, there are now enhanced Terraform pipelines that modify Palo Alto Networks, implement security and compliance as code and upgrade Kubernetes clusters in minutes rather than hours.
Dexcom has further engaged Contino to facilitate the next generation of technical and process enablement, with the expectation of a fully functioning DevSecOps team, process, and technology strategy underway.
