 Social media source - marketing.com Big data, cloud, social media, predictive analytics, mobility - more technology carts that have been added to the "digitization" roller coaster that is still in service with old carts such as e-commerce, online, and m-commerce. How do you maximize ROI and monetization impact of these digitization trends? The answer seems to depend very much on the industry you operate in as digital adoption by different industries is influenced by various factors such as consumer preferences, intensity of competition, physical vs virtual nature of goods and services being exchanged, financial impact of business process optimization, etc. For example, consumer experience is more important for virtual goods such as online music whereas merchandising and supply chain automation are crucial for grocery stores.
Here I will attempt to focus on cloud adoption considerations and how companies can maximize their ROI from cloud. It seems the key is in getting back to the basics on objectives - which are the key business process optimization levers that impact your company's top and bottom lines the most. Is it transforming the customer experience in the front-end and channel integration? Is it supply chain automation? Is it some other automation? or a combination of those? Only after knowing the answer to these questions can companies try to apply the benefits promised by the cloud - time to market, self service and cost reduction, automation, capacity on demand, etc. and decide on the right application areas for cloud introduction. Although privacy and regulatory considerations have an impact on cloud adoption, they can't be looked at from a macro perspective. By decomposing data and separating identifiable and non identifiable data elements, even a bank such as ANZ (Australia New Zealand) has been able to use public cloud for speed to market efficiency (source: Bank and Systems Technology magazine, Nov 2013).
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 Several mission critical applications (especially in the back office space of Banking and Financial Services sector) are typically run on mainframe or other proprietary midrange platforms (e.g. AS400). Many of these applications are maintained by managed service vendors. However, maintenance costs for such platforms can become quite high over time and it might be more difficult and expensive to add features to keep up with evolving business requirements. It is possible that organizations that own these applications and outsourced them to managed service vendors have less than the critical mass of staff required for maintaining these applications and have even lost some of the application knowledge due to attrition. In such situations, renegotiating managed service contracts for efficiency and cost reduction and even moving from one vendor to another can become tricky.
If you find yourself in such tight corners, technology transformation can come to the rescue. Laying out a plan to migrate the application to contemporary hardware and software platforms that can provide comparable reliability and availability can help turn the conversation around and shift the focus to agility and speed of IT response to business needs, application reverse engineering or re-engineering, and application knowledge management for the future. It is important to plan suitable proof of concepts and prototypes along the way to ensure that the end state of the transformation will satisfy the objectives laid out in the beginning. It is equally important to keep the existing managed services vendor as an important stakeholder in the transformation process. However, it is best to execute the development of the target platform using totally different set of vendors, platforms and tools. |
AuthorI am a Management Consultant in Banking and Financial Services. Check out my "home" and "about" pages for more details. Archives
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