Browsing by Author "Rossi, Aleksi"

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All in on agile: a case study of the challenges and success factors of an enterprise agile transformation in retail banking
(2020) Rossi, Aleksi
School of Business | Master's thesis
In today’s fast-paced innovation economy, companies are operating under an increasingly turbulent and volatile environment. Faced with the pressure from fierce global competition, rapid technological advancement, and evolving customer expectations, businesses have identified the need for transforming the way they generate value for their customers. Amongst the leading entrepreneurial practices helping firms to excel under the new competitive reality is enterprise agile which refers to adopting principles and methods that increase organizational speed and adaptability at scale to enable the delivery of highly customizable, high quality products or services. While these agile methods are being increasingly adopted in large organizations beyond just development functions, the understanding of how to scale agile in varying operating environments remains insufficient. This research provides empirical evidence of the best practices for scaling agile in a large organization by examining the major challenges and success factors encountered during a large-scale agile transformation. This study narrows its focus on the adoption of the enterprise agile model in the complex and highly competitive financial services sector by employing semi-structured interviews as the primary form of qualitative inquiry. Undergoing an agile transformation of unmatched scale in the Nordics, OP Financial Group was selected as the case company, where the phenomenon was studied among two teams operating within the same, development-oriented business unit. Considering this research context, the study contributes specifically to the understanding of adopting agile at large scale in the financial services industry in Finland. The findings of the study largely align with prior literature examining agile transformations and organizational agility, with the exception of a few key context-specific factors. A unified, yet customizable agile approach, along with systematic management support were identified as key contributors for a successful start for the transformation. On the other hand, the organization continued to deal with challenges mostly derived from the large organizational scale and complexity of the operating environment. Apart from the inherent rigidity resulting from having to comply with a complex set of regulations as well as both non-financial and financial risk policy, the company suffered from abundant development-related dependencies and a rigid technical environment in their pursue for agility.
Donate Speech: Collecting and Sharing a Large-Scale Speech Database for Social Sciences, Humanities and Artificial Intelligence Research and Innovation
(2022-10) Lindén, Krister; Jauhiainen, Tommi; Lennes, Mietta; Kurimo, Mikko; Rossi, Aleksi; Kurki, Tommi; Pitkänen, Olli
A3 Kirjan tai muun kokoomateoksen osa
The Donate Speech campaign aimed to collect 10 000 hours of ordinary, casual Finnish speech to be used for studying language as well as for developing technology and services that can be readily used in the languages spoken in Finland. In this project, particular attention has been paid to allowing for both academic and commercial use of the material. Even though the ambitious target currently seems to evade us, the Donate Speech campaign has managed to collect an extensive resource of more than 3500 h of Finnish colloquial speech with more than 200 000 speech recordings by roughly 50 000 speakers from all over Finland in just a few months.