Evolving platform and enablement at Thomson Reuters | Justin Wright, Matthew Dimich (Thomson Reuters)
Nov 8, 2023
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Justin Wright and Matthew Dimich, leaders at Thomson Reuters, discuss the evolution of their organization's structure and approach. They cover topics such as founding the platform team, key initiatives, the value of enablement, marketing the enablement team's work, and managing requests vs proactive work.
The enablement function within the platform organization plays a critical role in planning and delivering engagements, providing guidance, expertise, and engineering support to help teams migrate to the cloud, adopt modern tools, and improve development practices.
The platform organization at Thomson Reuters aims to complete its cloud migration by 2024 while continuously improving service offerings, promoting collaboration across different business units, and enabling developers to concentrate on customer value.
Deep dives
Shift towards a product mindset
The podcast episode discusses the platform organization at Thomson Reuters, which is transitioning towards a product mindset. They highlight the history of the organization and its enablement function, which constitutes a significant portion of their headcount. From cloud adoption to the rollout of modern tools, the enablement function plays a critical role in planning and delivering engagements. The episode provides practical insights for those interested in cloud migration or enablement functions.
Evolution of the platform organization
The episode traces the evolution of the platform organization at Thomson Reuters, starting with the establishment of the Cloud Center of Excellence in 2015. It details the decision to merge this team with the data center infrastructure services organization in 2017, resulting in the formation of the infrastructure hosting and networks team. The organization rebranded as platform engineering in 2021 to better reflect its vision and strategy of providing an engineering platform to all technologists at Thomson Reuters.
Driving value through enablement
The episode highlights the value and importance of the enablement function within the platform organization. Enablement teams focus on proactive engagement, providing guidance, expertise, and engineering support to help teams migrate to the cloud, adopt modern tools, and improve development practices. By offering centralized enablement services, Thomson Reuters ensures common strategic paths, accelerates the development process, and promotes collaboration across different business units.
Measuring success and future plans
The podcast discusses the metrics used to measure the impact and success of the platform organization. Key focus areas include cloud migration progress, adoption of modern DevOps toolsets, and cloud modernization initiatives. The organization aims to complete its cloud migration by 2024 while continuously improving service offerings and providing tailored support to different application teams. Looking ahead, the focus is on self-service capabilities and enabling developers to concentrate on customer value.
This week we’re joined by Justin Wright and Matthew Dimich, who lead Platform Engineering and Engineering Enablement at Thomson Reuters. Justin and Matt give an inside look at how they’ve evolved their organization’s structure and approach over the past 8 years.
Discussion points:
(1:03) Founding the platform team
(5:49) The current organizational structure
(9:00) Key initiatives the platform organization is focused on
(12:55) The enablement function within platform
(16:44) What drove the engagement function’s growth
(19:42) The value of having an enablement function
(24:05) Marketing the enablement team’s work
(29:47) How enablement interfaces with other platform teams