Anamarija Petrović, IT Director of Inspira Group - Innovations are imperative in digital business

After a year of rebranding to the Inspira group, Anamarija Petrovic, IT director in this company, reveals to us further plans for the development of digital platforms, but also the ways in which one of the oldest internet companies in Serbia improves the general digital business and the IT market in our country.

- The Inspira group has been operating and continuously growing on the market for more than 20 years, and this implies that the company has accumulated a lot of domain and technical knowledge. Our products are reliable and stable and the teams take care of them in an extremely responsible and dedicated way.

- After the phase of expansion, the Inspira group is now in the phase of deepening and optimization. In practice, this means that we are focused on projects aimed at consolidating processes, increasing efficiency through automation, monetizing data, structuring and sharing knowledge within the Group, improving the predictability of teams.

We are constantly in the process of automating internal processes and continuously improving the security of our systems and products. Some of our products are undergoing architectural transformations to improve scalability and sustainability. We are working on setting up the infrastructure for working with large amounts of data and we are actively experimenting with machine learning in the direction of application to our products, and in the use of AI tools to increase productivity. A lot has been done on the automation and resilience of the infrastructure, and we remain committed to that in the coming period as well.

When you combine all that with the innovations that businesses develop through their products and services, you will understand that we really do not lack challenges.

- Our advertising businesses have good cooperation with regional and European companies from the industry, with whom they exchange knowledge, good practices and insights about trends. We intend to restart this practice in the IT domain after it fell silent during the corona period.

Inspira Group is one of the founders and members of the Digital Serbia initiative, which helps the development of digital business and entrepreneurship in Serbia. When it comes to the local environment, we are one of the initiators of the IT Subotica 2030 initiative. Through this initiative, we strengthen the educational, digital and entrepreneurial development of the local environment.

One of our strategic goals is to be recognized in Serbia as a company that works for the improvement of society.

- The growth in the number of domestic product companies is extremely beneficial for our society. Serbia has long proven that it has enormous potential and quality when it comes to providing IT services. On that basis, our IT scene grew. However, a wider portfolio of domestic products entails the need for the development of competencies such as product management, design, product marketing. There are greater opportunities for the new generations to develop their talents and knowledge and get employed in their country, and of course all of this adds value to the strengthening of our economy.

The further development of these competencies gives a new opportunity to the Serbian IT service sector to win new clients through added value by working according to the "outcome-based" model. For us as a Group, strengthening these competencies is of interest, because this gives us more opportunities to exchange knowledge and good practices with partner companies. It is especially motivating to work in organizations that do not only pursue profit goals but also have a mission, such as our advertisers who strive to improve the market, each in their own sphere, making it more transparent.

- New technological opportunities such as artificial intelligence will require exceptional quality in the selection of personnel so that hyper production should not be the answer of the profession. A few years ago, I listened to a lecture by Mary Shaw, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, who asked a very meaningful question - has software engineering really already become engineering, like construction or architecture. Her thesis was that, historically speaking, the period that the profession has gone through is not enough to arrive at an engineering approach and methodology.

Given the speed at which it is progressing, some fundamental steps have been skipped. We need to move towards improving the industry by relying more on science and codified knowledge, and less on an exclusively experiential approach in solving business challenges.