As an operator in today’s hyper-competitive market, your ambitions are often challenged by daunting market realities. 

Spiraling expectations put engineering organizations under pressure; starting with cost and investment focus, on to delivery, right through to product impact. Satisfying customers requires new and improved video and home services. Meanwhile, you must ensure the user experience is memorable … for all the right reasons … to reduce churn and increase your customer base. 

This all demands that you find a way to scale and expand service delivery. That often requires both a culture change and a new way of working, based on a pre-determined strategic architectural foundation that underpins this delivery. Joining the Reference Design Kit (RDK) community helps you on that journey.

The RDK is an open source software platform for the connected home that standardizes functions for STBs, broadband and IoT devices. It underpins new services, helps drive business results and enables analytics for a differentiated customer experience. It is a vibrant community, that has to date delivered over 50+ million RDK devices into the market.

Graphic: Foundations to more efficient and effective engineering

Value-led Planning

While RDK delivers an “out-of-the-box” increase in engineering effectiveness and efficiency, it is best supported by skilled resources who understand where you, as an operator, need to deliver additional components and applications to have market impact. 

You need to be clear from the outset about the features and capabilities that will deliver value. This requires linking your organization’s objectives, value drivers and business metrics to what’s coming out of development. The more accurate you can be, the less chance you’ll have of wasting investment. 

Plan carefully, bring product owners and engineering together to pinpoint where you must focus capacity, aligning KPIs for each to support the business. 

Data-Driven Innovation

Transforming into an agile, data-driven organization with a supporting operating model demands savvy use of data. 

Invest in test automation and DevOps tooling that lets you deploy often, learn, adapt, optimize and repeat. The RDK’s logging, telemetry and diagnostics features support a data-driven transformation and help you link measurement tracking, metrics and KPIs across the entire organization. 

Continuously baseline deployment results, comparing real data on delivery cost to value returned, to improve your products and eliminate waste. Use the wealth of end-to-end data available to determine the effectiveness of deployments and to re-balance your investments accordingly.