SATURN 2018

Vendor selection can be a tedious process, especially for a multi-million-dollar development project. Issuing and receiving RFIs and the RFPs takes months of calendar time, and when the replies are measured in pounds rather than pages it quickly becomes no fun at all. But there is another way to do this… In this session I will tell the story of a joint effort by nine companies in the commodity trading business and how we selected a (set of) technology partners for our new FinTech startup in less than 6 weeks from beginning to end through an Open Development Challenge (ODC). The ODC forced us to focus our effort by defining an architectural representation of the problem, and then lead the ODC contestants through three phases (problem description, coding and innovation deep dive) to find the best partner(s). Because as we all know, the truth can only be found one place: in the code.