A Look Back To This Year And Into 2024

It's Kageyama, from KINTO Technologies!

I will look back into 2023 and look ahead to 2024.

This year, it feels like the world quickly returned to normal after the end of the pandemic. However, it's been only a little over six months since the reclassification of COVID-19 to Class 5 on May 8th. It might feel like a long time ago because a lot of things happened rapidly after that.

We've released many new services and features this year, but the most impactful one was the reconstruction of the KINTO ONE website. It was a critical challenge not to stop making improvements to the existing site during the reconstruction, so it took over two years, but we have released it in August finally. Thanks to everyone's hard work.

On the organizational side, we established a Culture & Working Stance. It was not something management thought of, but rather something that members discussed voluntarily and shaped little by little. Previously, our working style was ambiguously expressed as "in-house culture," which only the members who had experienced in-house development understood. I believe that this Culture & Working Stance, which more concretely represents our working style, is very important.

It has been a year where we have been able to build a strong foundation in both system and culture.
Building on this foundation, we aim to further evolve KTC next year.
To achieve this, we will focus on enhancing the following three aspects:

• Technical proficiency
• Development productivity
• Release speed

With regard to technical skills, we have continued to strengthen our Tech Blog and study sessions this year. Writing the Tech Blog has given team members the opportunity to reassess their skills, work on new technologies and processes that they had been curious about, and more. In the coming year, my plan is to engage a greater number of employees in this initiative.
This year we also had more opportunities to present at external events such as AWS Summit, as well as to hold study groups internally.
We have also started hosting our own events that were open to outside participants. Through mutual exchange of technical information involving talent, not only within the company but also outside, our own technical skills and knowledge will be strengthened.
We will also seek to increase these opportunities.

With regard to development productivity, we have begun to introduce a tool to visualize engineer productivity.
The tool is gradually proving effective, but we would like to increase the productivity of engineers from various perspectives, not just with this tool. We are beginning to take on the challenge of using generative AI, and we will increase our organizational efforts towards its practical application.
In addition to focusing on engineers, we would like to review the entire development process from requirement specification definition to release, and develop a company-wide development process that best fits KTC, not relying on common patterns.
By involving the business division in this process, we expect to improve productivity in a way that only in-house development can.

In terms of release speed, I believe that the speed of releases can be increased, especially for native apps, by promoting the componentization of functions. Also, by minimizing the number of functions to be developed, products can be released early and improvements can be made quickly based on customer feedback.
We can digest the requirements from the business department, determine the minimum necessary functions, and propose changes to the specifications to minimize man-hours from an engineer's point of view. If the requirements increase, the release date can be delayed accordingly.

This approach is very useful in fostering a sense of unity with the business department and is something that only an in-house development team can do. I hope to spread this style of development throughout the company.

This year has been busy, and next year will be even busier. If we can make our projects more efficient through the above efforts, we will be able to carry out more projects with the same number of people. We will build a system that enables us to carry out more projects by improving our technical capabilities, development productivity, and release speed.

We look forward to your continued support for KTC in the coming year.

KINTO Technologies Corporation
Executive Vice President
Hitoshi Kageyama