Over the last 12 to 18 months, we have seen ideas move increasingly beyond the product or market where they started. As we have brought more products into Lanas and strengthened our product and technology teams, people have begun sharing more of what they are building and learning.
A team solves a problem in one part of the business and somebody elsewhere sees an application for it. Technology built for one workflow turns out to be useful in another. Our Product Directors and their technology teammates work together, with support from commercial and marketing colleagues, and those opportunities begin to take shape.
Lanas Labs gives that work a name, a home and some structure. It has evolved from collaboration already happening across the company, and we want to make it easier for more teams to take part.
What is Lanas Labs?
Labs is a shared hub for ideas, technology, intellectual property and expertise that could be useful beyond their original application. Those ideas can come from any product, team or market. They may be something we have built ourselves, or a capability and know-how that comes into Lanas through an acquisition. Labs helps us recognise their wider potential, refine them where needed and make them accessible to others.
The People Behind It
The people behind this matter. We have some excellent Product Directors in Lanas. They work closely with their technology teams and customers, and increasingly with each other. That has helped create a culture where people share what they are seeing, what they are trying and what is working.
When brilliant people work together like that, exciting things happen. Someone discovers that another team has already solved part of their problem. Something built in Ireland has an application in Australia or New Zealand. A capability developed for one type of healthcare customer turns out to be relevant to another.
Our products serve different markets, users and workflows, so each team needs to judge what makes sense for its customers. Many ideas have wider applications, though, and we should make it easy for teams to see what exists across Lanas and decide where it could help.
Build Once, Deploy Many
We are already seeing this in practice. Our payments capability is now being deployed across three regions, and our organic AI services are expanding across a growing number of products. HARPS, our document signing and data-capture capability, began with a specific healthcare use case and has potential well beyond it. Patient communications, reporting, analytics and other shared services offer similar opportunities.
Build once, deploy many is part of the thinking behind Labs. If a team has developed something that works well, another team should be able to build on that work rather than repeat it. That means making the technology reusable, but also helping colleagues understand how it works and where it might fit.
Often, what a team has learned is just as useful as the software itself: how they approached a problem, what customers responded to, or what they would do differently next time. Labs gives us somewhere to share that experience too. Learning and communication are a substantial part of its purpose.
As Lanas grows, we want our teams to have a clearer view of what is being built elsewhere and feel comfortable reaching across product and regional boundaries.
“Before starting from scratch, we should know whether somebody else in Lanas has already solved part of the problem. Equally, when a team develops something useful, we should be thinking about who else could benefit. That is the thinking behind Labs.”
Dr Sean Higgins, CPO
We expect Labs to be a significant accelerator for growth over the next 24 months. We can already see the benefit in payments and AI, and every product and team we bring into Lanas adds to the expertise we can share. Labs gives us a way to make more of that collective experience, so useful ideas reach more customers and the people building our products can learn from one another.