The Volkswagen Group IT is developing consistently agile, digital solutions for a range of customers, including universities, technology partners and the business units within the Volkswagen Group. In Volkswagen’s new Digital Lab in Berlin, the company has entered into a strategic partnership with software development company Pivotal. Experts across the Volkswagen business, from sales to technical IT development, are working with Pivotal to develop new software and mobility solutions for networked customers.
"In our Digital Lab, we are working on developing an ecosystem that creates a new user experience for our customers, new mobility services and services for connected vehicle providers," says Volkswagen Group CIO Dr. Martin Hofmann. "We will provide our customers with completely new offerings, as we transform Volkswagen from a pure car manufacturer to a mobility provider."
Simultaneously, Volkswagen is implementing and developing innovative ways of working internally. "In our Labs in Berlin and Munich, our IT experts are working with a Silicon Valley mindset, brought from The Valley to Volkswagen. Pivotal has also supported our IT team by training more than 20 of our experts in a range of locations from California to Colorado, teaching them about new software development methodologies. We want to firmly anchor these skills and work processes in the Group and in Germany. In our Labs in Berlin, Munich and San Francisco over 600 programmers, data scientists, design thinking experts and cloud architects are working in this manner," says Hofmann.
"From the outset, Volkswagen software engineers working in collaboration with Pivotal were developing innovative software solutions at start-up speeds," says Edward Hieatt, Senior Vice President, Services of Pivotal. "Going forward, the plan is the establishment of a new IT platform."
Volkswagen and Pivotal are utilising innovative software development techniques, based on types of agile programming such as "Extreme Programming", which have been successfully used by companies in Silicon Valley. In addition, the software developers are consistently pair-programming with daily standup meetings, weekly training sessions and continuous feedback in order to improve team performance. This partnership encourages an exchange of ideas and creativity within teams, reduces errors, shortens the software development processes and enables faster adjustments when customer requirements change rapidly.
