Building A Cloud Computing Roadmap; tips for leveraging cloud computing for banking and financial services IT
February 14, 2012
Today’s knowledge-based workforce in the financial services sector has become more agile, flexible, and highly mobile. The confluence of these two elements – always available cloud computing and mobile savvy employees – continues to enable work to be competed faster and cheaper. Cloud computing fuels the virtual world of development, product management, and project management in ways that were unforeseen in the last decade, and the landscape continues to evolve at light speed for collaboration, alignment and velocity.
However, the explosion of cloud computing and the mobile workforce has been a bit of a catch 22 for IT departments in the financial services sector…
Today’s demands for IT in banking are not just knowing about technology, but applying and aligning it to the strategic business goals of the corporation. Banks today are challenged with data security, customer satisfaction, legal costs, and mobile strategies for their customer base. Using IT as a competitive advantage to increase performance by bringing all these work items to market isn’t simply dialogue or prose, it’s now mandatory. Banking accountability, risk management and governance in all departments, including IT, is stronger now than it’s ever been. The rush to provide additional services and results to the business requires agility and flexibility. Cloud computing enables both.
Cloud computing has dramatically increased the profile and influence of IT departments, and it drives increased demand. Seemingly every department from marketing, customer support and finance is lining up with requests for new solutions and applications. They are pushing to host these applications in the cloud, which in many cases is a double-edged sword. This always creates more demand and usually not enough resources.
To solve this problem, the banking industry is driving a renewed focus on Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and respective solutions to manage IT projects and resources effectively. According to a 2011 Aberdeen report, "Project Portfolio Management: Selecting the Right Projects for Optimal Investment Opportunity," the pressures forcing IT organizations to seek better project management and reporting tools include:
- Increasing risk exposure across the project portfolio
- Lack of available skilled resources needed for projects
- Decreasing visibility and transparency across projects and allocated resources
Reducing these challenges will be critical as IT departments in banking will not only be accountable for the IT function’s success and transformation, but continue to adopt an external business focus to drive innovation and strategic advantage in pursuit of the corporate goals.
By adopting cloud-based PPM and Application Portfolio Management (APM) solutions, some financial organizations have achieved the same deep analytics and reporting capabilities across their IT portfolios that other areas of their businesses have already deployed.
These IT management solutions are improving an organization’s ability to collaborate and prioritize strategic areas of the business and associated projects that provide customer value and increase wallet share. IT management solutions are enabling their teams to focus on the projects that are central to profitable growth, rather than building and maintaining internal applications.
From our work with financial organizations, we have learned that implementing a SaaS PPM solution has improved productivity by eliminating about 50 percent of an IT organization’s previous "workarounds" that end-users had relied on to deal with legacy computer system shortcomings. The competitive landscape for banking institutions requires this sort of return on investment to compete globally.
These cloud-based IT management investments raise the bar by shifting the focus of IT implementations away from simply installing new technology to re-engineering business processes and facilitating change management.
IT solution providers should become strategic partners to IT organizations to help them make the transition from cost center to change agent. PPM and APM solutions could be one instrument in the arsenal of tools to achieve this transition.
Lee Iacocca once commented when discussing Chrysler’s turnaround, "there are those who the make dust and those that eat it." Cloud computing and cloud-based IT management solutions are the V8 engines creating the dust these days. The time to make the move is now because procrastination is the thief of dreams.