It’s another busy day in IT, and there’s a lot on the minds of the IT leadership team.
How’s that digital transformation initiative going?
How’s the cloud migration program looking?
Are the app modernization projects on track for an on-time and on-budget release?
These may be a few questions IT executives in the Financial Services sector have on their minds at any given moment—sometimes even in their dreams.
One could easily extend this line of thinking (or questioning) to other technology-based initiatives that are also likely underway across the organization as it looks for ways to stay relevant, competitive, and resilient. For example, how are the artificial intelligence, open finance, and hyper-automation projects going?
This tech-based view of measuring success is natural for technical leaders and managers in and around IT. This tech-based view may even be reaching other levels and functions around the organization as tech terms and lingo make their way onto television, the radio, and into your peers’ and colleagues’ daily meetings.
Don’t expect this to go away any time soon. This tech-based view is very likely to continue to broaden and deepen for many years to come. For example, this year alone, Forrester forecasts tech spending by banks to achieve double-digit growth.(1)
Gartner concurs with this sentiment that technology investments will be significant, forecasting that worldwide IT spending will grow more than 5% across all sectors this year, reaching almost $4.5 trillion—as organizations turn to more strategic long-term programs over reactionary project-based spending. (2)
Not surprisingly, the cloud will continue to be the centerpiece for new digital experiences, forecasted by Gartner to swipe $474 billion from the pocketbooks of organizations around the globe, where revenue rooted in the cloud is expected to surpass non-cloud revenue in the next few years. To further this point, it is likely that, by 2025, 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle, and over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms. (3)
While it’s the analysts’ job to figure out how and where money is being spent, IT organizations’ job is to ensure that these investments are allocated to the right initiatives and projects. It’s not enough to tie the tech investments to a product release, a data center migration, or another transformation project milestone; they must be connected to what drives the organization toward its business objectives.
Take a step back to see what modern, forward-thinking FinServ organizations—and their leaders—are looking to accomplish beyond the technical innovations, and you may find two significant trends that have emerged in conversations amongst your executive leadership team: being future-fit and becoming environmentally sustainable.
Technology is central to an organization’s success (or failure) in achieving its long-term objectives. This is evident in the amount of money spent now and into the foreseeable future. It’s not just about the features that the technology brings to the table. Technology must also be:
- flexible to either fit or create the business infrastructure and workflows to support the operational requirements necessary to achieve those objectives.
- deployable, configurable, securable, maintainable, monitorable, and tunable to ensure it supports the resiliency requirements required to achieve those objectives.
- capable of scaling, growing, and adapting in the most efficient manner possible to support the sustainability requirements necessary to achieve those objectives.
As you think about these requirements for being future-fit and resilient, you probably have some of these things blocking your train of thought:
- Today’s aggressive time to market requirements is often unrealistic.
- Developer angst and dissatisfaction are real and lead to a lack of productivity.
- The build-to-delivery process is fragile, complex, and requires multiple hand-offs.
- Infrastructure provisioning and management is a lengthy, convoluted, and manual process.
- Operational inefficiencies in managing on-premises and hybrid/multi-cloud environments are getting in the way of progress.
- Constant changes in the technology landscape exacerbate the lack of skills and expertise in an already understaffed environment.
As an IT executive in Financial Services, you know these challenges all too well. You probably speak about these concerns with your peers regularly.
Now, it’s time, as a leader in the financial services sector, to move beyond traditional bottom-line, tactically driven projects that are riddled with the anxieties and worries highlighted above. It’s time to develop an IT strategy that doesn’t crush your team as it serves the ultimate business objectives and the more considerable societal value it is trying to achieve. This is precisely where—and when—it makes sense to bring in Taos as a strategic partner for near-term success and long-term achievements.
By partnering with Taos, your technical programs, your digital transformation initiatives, and especially your long-term strategic business objectives, can come together in a way that not only meets the definition of success that you’ve outlined but does so in a way that addresses each of the concerns noted earlier that you may be carrying as an IT leader. Taos helps organizations take advantage of existing systems and data, improve automation, identify new areas of innovation, and build the tools and processes needed to promote new revenue growth while creating a path to the long-term future-fit and resilient organization expects to be in the years to come.
Taos will align our efforts to your business needs as they change and grow. We will also stay on top of the latest operational advancements to create an efficient, secure, and agile cloud infrastructure that leverages the latest technologies, including artificial intelligence, IoT, blockchain, open banking, and big data.
One example where Taos has succeeded includes the accelerated digital transformation program for a large financial institution based in California.4 Throughout the project, the Taos team worked closely with the bank operations and technical teams to train, transfer knowledge, and provide turnover documentation to ensure the customer was empowered to run the new tools, technologies, and processes efficiently.
The Taos team successfully accelerated the digital transformation process by implementing a “best-in-class” assessment, design, and deployment methodology that helped the bank execute its strategic goals:
- Overall productivity and time to market were improved with a 95% reduction in deployment times.
- End-to-end provisioning lifecycles were reduced from months to days.
- Developer productivity was improved by an estimated 40%.
Most importantly, Taos significantly enhanced the Bank’s security posture and provided a capability to be leveraged for future cloud offerings, leading them to a future as a future-fit, sustainable financial services institution.
Let Taos’ long-standing financial services industry expertise help you get started. The Taos team has the resources, expertise, and experience to embrace today’s technologies and drive the sustainable innovation trends of tomorrow. Most importantly, we can connect those two things to the vision for your institution.
Citations
1 – “Banks Will Double Down On Innovation In 2022,” Forbes, Nov 11, 2021 (link)
2 – “Gartner Forecasts Worldwide IT Spending to Grow 5.1% in 2022,” Gartner, January 18, 2022 (link)
3 – “Gartner Says Cloud Will Be the Centerpiece of New Digital Experiences,” Gartner, November 10, 2021 (link)
4 – “Taos Accelerates a Digital Transformation for a Large Financial Institution,” Taos, 2021 (link)