Digitalising the Enterprise - CIO’s LEADING role

Written By sajindra jayasena

Introduction

Having lead Technology transformation in critical and flagship business lines in a Tier 1 bank followed up by playing Executive CTO in a FinTech and now as CIO and Chief Digital Officer (part of Senior Executive team) , wanted to share my experience re: the role of executive CIO/CTO in an Enterprise driving technology and digital transformation.

From my experience I feel a Senior “hands on and up to date” technologist (CIO, CTO) with the domain knowledge and vision should lead digitalisation of an enterprise. Why?

  • Users most of the time dont know what is out there and may look at implementing the same process in a new technology.

  • They may not have seen different and alternate technologies that is out there that can replace a process ( e.g. Intelligent document processing - IDP instead of manual extraction from documents)

  • Create “technology capabilities” that can be re-used to repeatedly build different business functions.

Approach for Digital Transformation

From my past experience, its clearly not a 100% technology problem. its always 50% people/culture and 50% technology. Ability of the people and organisation to embrace new ways of working is essential in “adopting” tech. The CIO/CTO plays a key role in “selling” the new idea, solutions and more importantly “show and telling” what can be done. Gone are the days for massive waterfall projects with 100s of pages of documents. All those has been replaced with “fail/ prove fast” pilot/PoC and MVPs/MLP ( Minimum Likeable Products) to delivery solutions for “hands on testing and usage”

Enterprise Technology : From “Anchor” to “motor” in accelerating and enabling Enterprise growth

For enterprises who are not IT/Software companies , IT was touted as a “support function” and an “order taking” function. This is changing rapidly in the last decade or so. CIO/CTO’s job is to lead from the front on;

  • How Technology can be an Transformation enabler for improving revenue, reducing the cost and massively improving efficiency while reducing operational risks.

  • Proactively drive innovation through internal “innovation” functions or engaging third parties to bring in new ideas, processes.

  • Be Agile ,driving iterative and evolving solutions to achieve continuous improvements

  • Think “out of the box” and provide the required “thought leadership”

  • Be proactive : Engage the actual users / communities - traders, analysts, operations, finance, HR. Have sessions to understand their problems both short and long term

  • Be direct: The worst can happen is when the “user” and “provider” is intermediated with layers of consultants and “non-practioners” telling both parties what to do. Be brave to engage the users with “domain knowledgable technologists” to solve problems quickly. This worked for me ALL the time.

  • Fast Fail/Fast proof: Users like to see progress ( who doesn’t!). So look at how you deliver continuously improving, evolving solution.

  • Look at conducting MVL ( Minimum Loveable Product ) Extraction from Aha!

“To build an MLP, you must deeply consider what customers care about, the problems they have, and how to make their lives better. Consider the customer experience as a whole and strive for love at every stage. MLP thinking builds upon the concept of the MVP, which aims to create the most basic version of a product with just enough features to be usable. As noted above, the goal of an MLP is to think about the Complete Product Experience(CPE) and strive to achieve lovability as your product matures”

What do the users want?

In most of my career I had come across this. Users are not sure what they want or their requirement is not the actual requirement.

Steve Jobs didnt go and ask users what they want to see from a mobile phone! Some times users only have the visibility/exposure and experience to what they have seen. A CIO/CTO’s job is to provide the wider insight and the enlightenment needed to solve the problem differently.

i.e. the users want a candle.. actually the user is asking for “light” and there are better efficient and reliable ways of providing solutions to solve business problems

Technology AND culture change

Enterprises needs a massive change in how they adopt technology and digitalisation. Using old school methodologies of water fall delivery and requirements management processes don’t work any more and stifle innovation. Innovation needs SMEs from all areas ( business, tech) to work together.

its key that the culture shift is addressed before venturing into any large scale delivery. Driving Agile based delivery requires every one’s commitment

Conway’s Law

Conway Law, formulated by Melvin Conway states

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

Conway understood that software coupling is enabled and encouraged by human communication.

Inverse Conway Manuever

While this is a mouthful , originally coined here the reverse approah I have adopted, focused on;

  • Designing and building reusable business capabilities which are

    • Autonomous

    • Can be delivered with one single team

I have articulated this under my previous blog post where a organisational agnostic yet flexible service based model can be delivered in an evolutionary architecture approach.

What dimensions a CIO should focus on?

In one of my previous blogs I talked about the 3 ingredients for successful Tech transformation 1) People/Culture 2) Architecture 3) Engineering process.

In order to deliver solutions we need to remind that what we do with our “commodity” which is Data. Its not only giving a user experience from applications and data but also ensure the experience in secure and reliable.

In my various endeavours I had the privilege and honour in directly and proactively driving business change through technology.

From a CIO perspective I have been focusing on below dimensions that will help the enterprise drive its digitalisation agenda.

  • Maximise automation and reduce human worker dependencies

  • Application adoption especially focusing on a service based architecture that is extensible across multiple business lines.

  • Data first approach for visibility, control, decision making, exposing arbitrating opportunities.

  • Security, scalability, time to market and cloud adoption

Capability based model

Historically applications were build for individual businesses. This creates duplicity, reduces time to market resulting in higher maintenance and change costs. Alternate approach is a capability model where

  • Re-usable services, applications , data platforms that can be extended and re-used across different businesses

  • Re-usable pluggable business processes , and “lego” like composable services and applications that can be used to delivery functionality to new businesses.

  • Select “platform of choices” for each critical business functionality

This where an experienced CIO/CTO can really shine by;

  • Proactively looking at what technical capabilities that need to be build. These can be

    • Application and workflows

      • Functional capability / service based systems ( This depends on the domain - for e.g. in Trading and risk - Software frameworks for CRM, trade capture, scheduling, logistics, modules for risk management covering counterparty risk, market risk, exposure, PnL, and positions , cash flow and trade finance etc etc).

      • Workflow frameworks that can be used to build “pluggable” workflows/ UIs business rules

    • Data focused

      • Automation in data feeds, external data integration

      • Data integration fabric / APIs

      • Data warehouses for transactional , market, reporting , price/time series data , documents

    • Infrastructure and DevOps

      • streamlines infrastructure, services provisioning and deployment

      • Automation in QA, Dev Ops, production monitoring using CI/CD DevSecOps tooling and processes

Typical template capabilities that can be built (in this example for a financial institution, trading house) can be as below;

Template capability model for a FS/ Trading house

Automation, Automation.. automation

A key theme CIO must lead is automating the business processes. Automation MUST cover aspects of

  • Avoid duplicate data entry , “enter once/store once” —-> Use/re-use many times

  • “Zero touch” data propagation across systems

  • User / role based workflows

Digital Workers (Bots)

A key area where digitalisation can be accelerated in a sustainable way is by adopting “Digital workers”.

What are digital workers? They are software programs that replace mundane/repetitive tasks a human can do. That can include information extraction, document classification, pattern matching etc.This requires training the bot using sample and test data and but the end results is to automate as much as possible with appropriate human intervention/ exception management when the digital workers can’t perform their task.

But from my experience don’t use a bot to “facade” a poorly implement technical solution using Robotic Process Automation. An example can be that a user manually enters same data in two applications. So adding a RPA bot to do “screen scraping” and adding information into second screen is a poor architecture solution. The right solution is provide a data integration between the two systems!

Control cockpits.. Simplicity

Another aspect is ensuring users receive a positive experience in using the systems. Clunky, unusable , in-effiicient user interfaces increase user pressure/stress and increases the probability of error. A contextual and responsive UI that joined as a single “cockpit” is needed. One salient example is how complex dashboard(s) in a rocket/ space shuttle cockpit has simplifies drastically through the years.

Strategic Data sources and integration fabric

For de-duplicated and accurate data access and sourcing its critical to have single source of truth for each entity of data. i.e. single “owner” , “multiple consumers” ( single master, multiple slave) model is really important.

Also a data orchestration and integration fabric is also required to ensure

  • data flow is consistent

  • Accurate and guaranteed

  • Timely

Refer to my previous article on Domain Driven Architecture regarding service based approach

Evolutionary architecture and continuous delivery for success

One of the key things I have learned is large scale projects without continuous delivery ALWAYS fail. Also formulating an end state architecture in v era detail that will be realised 3 yrs later will also fail. As I have blogged under my previous article

  • Need to formulate the overall high level end state architecture but not the full detail

  • Ensure the architecture is flexible and can be refined step by step as requirements and process changes ( we are in a dynamic environment and most of the case the requirements were not understood fully in the first place!)

  • Start with a walking skeleton / Minimum Loveable product to ensure requirements and approach is verified.

sajindra jayasena
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