In connecting more than 600 million car buyers and sellers throughout ASEAN, the iCar Asia network attracts over eight million visitors on a monthly basis.

Spanning Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, the business aspires to be more than merely a vehicle portal. Rather, iCar aims to be a connection point for buyers, sellers and learners within the automotive industry.

Yet personalisation is a challenging undertaking when attracting millions of users. How can a business connect to many, but engage on an individual basis?

The first step in achieving such ambitions was undertaken by Group CIO Pedro Sttau, who deployed a single platform strategy across all consumer products.

Representing the company’s first wave of transformation, this resulted in a change of internal approach, focusing on “operations first, people second and technology third”.

After adopting a platform operating model, Sttau and his department aligned teams to key business objectives, offering “full ownership” over the scope of work being delivered.

Following M&A activity, iCar’s expanded portfolio also resulted in the need to support multiple legacy monolithic platforms. In response, Sttau created a new cloud native code base, leveraging microservices to enable the business to scale rapidly at a lower costs.

Other key benefits included reduced time to market for new features and products.

Despite a transformation overhaul, Sttau opted to pay “little focus” to technology to ensure enablement of employees and the creation of a structure capable of removing IT barriers for staff.

This resulted in removing unnecessary reporting lines and layers, complemented by an enhanced focus on automation, DevOps and key internal KPIs.

While technology was the “tangible asset” created by such an approach, the real value centred in the cultural shift that took place with iCar.