CIO interview: Rick Bisset, The Cotswold Company

Agile IT is the lifeblood of an e-commerce, but resistance to change is still common

The Cotswold Company was founded in 2003 - a time when e-commerce was, to an extent, in its infancy. That made the concept of an online-only store selling big-ticket items like furniture a risky one.

However, says IT director Rick Bisset, that early positioning meant that the company "stole a march on the competition," and - in a reversal of the standard business model - has now branched out to add physical stores. Most of the business still comes from its online presence, though.

The website was originally built using the open-source platform Actinic, with extra functionality bolted on as customer expectations have changed. Recently, Bisset has switched to a new application platform called Angular.

"We started with Actinic and then we migrated to Angular a year ago, which is quite an unusual modern technology for an e-commerce platform; I'm not aware that many retailers are using it yet, but it's a great tool for building rich user interfaces. You can almost build functionality that you'd expect with a desktop application in a website.

"It's been really powerful, but it means that it's an extra skill set that you need to recruit for. It's got its own challenges, but it's worked out well; it's delivered a better website than we would have otherwise had with .NET."

The Actinic-to-Angular switch meant that Bisset could kill the use of postback on the website, which means that options can be changed without doing a full page refresh. Although that's great from a user experience point of view, it does add complications in other areas:

"It's a bit of a challenge when it comes to SEO. Google, for example; although they wrote Angular, they have some nuances of crawling Angular pages, which we're struggling with… It's only just come to light, but there are a few techniques that we can use [to overcome the issue] that we've found online, which pre-render the page.

"Rather than it being dynamic...you can effectively pre-render it so that when Google crawls it it can see all of the content, rather than the content injecting dynamically. I'm not quite sure what impact that's going to have on the user experience, but hopefully it'll be fairly minor."

DevOps: it's not always easy...

At the same time as the platform change, The Cotswold Company has been going through a transformation in its working practices and adopting DevOps. Appropriately, Bisset was talking to us at Computing's DevOps Summit.

"Coming from an e-commerce background the IT's pretty pivotal to the business. Fortunately the founder recognised that, and as a result gave me a free pass to construct the team and carry out practices as I saw fit… and now we've got a team of 10."

The IT team's use of DevOps has required an adjustment period from the business side of the company. Bisset explained:

"I've been keen to get good processes and practices in place from day one… We don't really work to timeframes, which is one of the challenges; businesses quite like timeframes and Gantt charts and knowing when to expect certain things to arrive, whereas agile - you just have a backlog and you churn through it incrementally. It's very difficult to say, ‘We'll be delivering this change on this date - prepare yourselves for it'."

He added, "The IT team works to an agile framework, while the business is more attuned to a waterfall approach… When it comes to complex IT projects, where the requirements are relatively unknown and the solution is even less clear - then, when we try to work to a Gantt chart, plan-based approach it just quite easily falls apart. There are just so many uncertainties… You spend your whole time updating your plan."

On the other hand, agile methodologies have been a great help in reacting to potential threats in the marketplace:

"[Agile] lends itself well to the business itself, because it's a nimble, flexible beast. We have business plans and intentions, but quite often - because priorities change or because competitors have brought out some other offering - we change tack very quickly, so it's kind of a double-edged sword. Running agile has helped us [to] stay nimble. It's working really well for us."