Transcript
I'm Nagashima. I'm a member of Tokyo Gas Co., Ltd. and I'm a member of the platform team. I participated in this year's HASHICONF, and I also made an announcement in the hallway track. The host and the audience were very friendly, so I was able to announce it with confidence. The heat of the event itself was very high, and I was very inspired. The venue was San Francisco, but it was a very advanced city, with automatic taxi driving like this. In San Francisco, cable cars have been operating for a long time, but I thought it was a very interesting city because there was a cross between the old technology of cable cars and the new technology of automatic driving. First of all, let me introduce Tokyo Gas. Tokyo Gas was founded in 1885, and it will be a company with a very long history, celebrating its 140th anniversary this year. If you have 10,000 yen in your hand, I think you're probably drawing a picture, but it's a company founded by A. H. Shibusawa. Not only in Tokyo, but also around the country and around the world. The number of customers for Toshigasu is close to 9 million, and the number of customers for electricity is more than 4 million. We have received a lot of contracts from customers. A big feature of the Tokyo Gas Group is that it develops business from the procurement of raw materials to providing services to households and companies. Tokyo Gas is now in its 3rd year of operation. The business of Tokyo Gas starts with the light that illuminates the city. In 1969, we started importing liquid natural gas for the first time in Japan. We are now in the 3rd year of operation, and we are aiming to expand our revenue by contributing to the global environment by decarbonizing and digitalizing. Today, I would like to talk a little bit about internal development in the B2C area. As many of you may know, there has been a huge environmental change in our industry. Electricity has been fully decarbonized since 2016, and Toshigasu has been fully decarbonized since 2017. As a result, the energy company has become a choice for customers. It is not just about providing energy, but we need to always think about what kind of value we can provide to our customers. In addition to the conventional physical contact, it has become a critical issue to improve customer acquisition and experience value in digital contact. In such an era of rapid change, we want to provide value as soon as possible to our customers. In Tokyo Gas, we are launching an engineering team and internalizing the product development organization. In the Living Strategy Division Digital Product Promotion Group, which I am a member of, we are developing and operating our own products in the B2C area. What we are particularly particular about is that the members who have knowledge in business, the members who have knowledge in technology, and the members who have knowledge in creativity are in the same organization. Because there are various members in the same organization, we think that we can deliver value as one. This is the organization diagram of our organization. Various people, including engineers, designers, and product owners, belong to the same organization. We form a team for each web service and mobile service and carry out daily activities. The main product of our organization is a member service for customers called MyTokyo Gas. Customers can check the cost of gas and electricity through this application. You can also collect points, and you can confirm or exchange points. This application was mainly renewed around the front end in 2023. The back end is still in the group company's hands, but mainly around the front end, the development system has been standardized. I would like to talk about the history of that area while looking back at it from a platform perspective. Here is today's presentation. First, we started internalization and introduced HCP Terraform. We are currently working on self-service. We would like to expand internalization in the future. First, we launched an internalization organization at the beginning of internalization. We released the content we launched in the tech blog. We also created a place to announce in various places. While appealing to the outside world what we are doing, we actively adopted the necessary human resources of engineers and designers. With this achievement, we were able to create a platform team with more engineers. We were able to create a platform team, but at that time, there were three people, and the situation was busy as before. For example, the maintenance and management of the CI and CD flow was a hassle, and it took a little time to investigate Terraform. To meet these challenges, we introduced HCP Terraform. I think those who already use it know well, but if you create a pull request, it will automatically collect the plan. There is also a rich UI, so we can concentrate on the infrastructure management that we really need. This is one-on-one one day, but when I was talking to the app development members, there was a story that the infrastructure construction is done by the platform team. There are many members who have changed jobs from various places, so there are many members who belong to various organizations. In the background of this person, there was a story that the development team was making infrastructure at Terraform. At that time, there was no such opportunity at all, so it was a big issue. As the first step, we started with the environment variable that the app member often touches, so that even the app member can fix it with Terraform. The environment variable is changed frequently during the release of the app, so I think it is very important to be able to fix it with such app members. While recommending various things, there are still some issues that have not been solved. There was a story that it is necessary to request an infrastructure member when adding secrets. It is around here. It is more efficient to give authority to various people, but if you give authority to many people, the security risk will increase. So I think it is difficult to balance. Also, there is a problem that there is no infrastructure in the app developer because there is a lot of division between the app member and the infrastructure member. When there is a problem, there is a problem that the app developer cannot troubleshoot the infrastructure. In fact, I think it is true that the infrastructure side also needs the knowledge of the app to design the optimal infrastructure, so we are still considering what kind of team structure and what kind of exchange mechanism is best to solve this area. Returning to the business situation, we are aware that we need to respond quickly to the changing customer news by internalizing various services in the competitive environment. Based on the MyTokyoGas, which is starting to internalize, we are thinking of expanding the area of internalization. The most important thing is to focus power on the core part of the business. For example, the management of CI and CD, and the payment of the environment. For the non-core business, we will offload more and more to the HCP platform. For the engineers and other members of the internal development organization, it is a more core business. For example, I think it is important to focus on the important business such as developing new applications and learning about business. I think it is important to make better things through the interaction of business, creative, technology, and members with different backgrounds. Our organization is planning to hold a meeting in the form of a bazaar. In this bazaar, regardless of the occupation, we have a place to discuss and give opinions on the issues of the product. In this bazaar, there are ideas to reduce the inquiries from customers, and it is a place to realize the effectiveness of such meetings. To sum up, for non-core business such as CI and CD, we will use the HCP platform to offload more and more, and we want to focus on the core part of the business in the future. That's all for the presentation. Thank you for listening.
