Accelerating digital transformation with an enterprise-wide platform approach

Industry Perspective

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Industry Perspective

Knock Down Organisational Boundaries to Accelerate InnovationConventional management theory has advocated for a siloed approach to organisational design, based on the perception that specialisation and utilisation drive economies of scale. This thinking proliferated through the banking industry starting around 1960 and has continued with the establishment and growth of the ‘IT department’.

Perhaps because of this, enterprises to date have focussed heavily on delivering technology infrastructure platforms that provide a foundation for shared services such as networks, servers, storage, end user compute, help desks and databases that in turn support multiple applications. The benefits of this approach are many — including reuse, the smarter allocation of scarce resources, more standardised assets, reduced unit costs and improved redundancy.

However, little has been done to extend this approach beyond the infrastructure realm and into the application, integration and customer experience tiers. And so for banks with extensive legacy portfolios, the benefits of technology infrastructure platforms cannot be fully realised. In other words, the benefits are siloed because the application portfolio is siloed.

Digital disruption

Meanwhile, the advent of IaaS and SaaS technologies has combined with the proliferation of Agile, DevOps and Continuous Development methodologies to accelerate the pace at which financial technologies (fintechs) are innovating. As a result, new entrants to the banking space — unencumbered by legacy portfolios — are quickly and fully realising infrastructure-like platform benefits.

This is ultimately helping these new entrants disrupt the banking industry. They are actively connecting business and IT assets and, at this intersection, delivering business agility and innovation to drive profitable growth. And in doing so, they are also better balancing the risk and return of their different IT investments.

To keep pace, established banks need to rapidly develop organisational capabilities — such as adopting cloud, mobile, data and social technologies — to take advantage of a changing ecosystem. To do so, they’ll need to reorganise their old siloed approaches. This means enabling common capabilities (or discrete business logic) and efficiently managing them without the technological and organisational boundaries of the past.

Thinking platform as a new operating model

The fundamental construct of this new enterprise operating model is Thinking Platform — creating a fabric of connected and standardised business and technical capabilities across the enterprise and its partner ecosystem. By applying a Thinking Platform approach to its operating model, a bank can decide where to standardise on commodity business services and where to differentiate for competitive advantage.

A well-thought-out platform strategy can enable large enterprises like banks to:

• Abstract legacy complexity from business users who create value from those assets and enable them to rapidly build new business capabilities or functionality

• Provide the optimal way to govern, develop, enrich and eventually sunset business capabilities (or specific domains) required to compete in the market

Industry Perspective

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• Overcome the silo effects in enterprises due to historical ways of managing assets using the entire enterprise as the scope for change

• Integrate legacy apps and newer technologies to create an overall ecosystem of capabilities

• Centre organisational design around business capabilities with autonomous empowered teams across the DevOps life cycle with co-populated teams from the business and IT disciplines

• Create foundational capabilities with speed and robustness for each new app built for eventual end users or customers

What “good” looks like

With Thinking Platform, large enterprises can take advantage of their existing complex and legacy assets and move towards a digital enterprise capable of competing against agile and nimble competitors born without such restrictions.

Platform “producers” are responsible for the end-to-end ownership of discrete business functions. This ensures that common business logic is managed centrally and not duplicated across business domains and applications. Platform teams are responsible for the ongoing enhancement of the platform from a function and performance perspective, ensuring consumers can rely on a defined level of service. Functions are exposed via APIs to enable other teams (consumers) to leverage the shared capability and enable accelerated delivery in their individual domains.

Meeting the demands of the digital economy and customer centricity will be a sort of self-service fabric that weaves together business and technical capabilities across the enterprise and the broader ecosystem. This requires a suite of cloud services provided as a platform — readily available for consumption across the enterprise.

Figure 1. Digital Integration Fabric (DIF)

Industry Perspective

This Digital Integration Fabric (DIF) allows for rapid assembly of the customer experience by leveraging automation in development, testing execution and governance. In addition, the DIF provides a secure method for connecting any combination of on-premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications and data across the enterprise. The DIF is more than a simple collection of APIs; it is an intelligently coordinated integration of all the complementary technical capabilities.

Crucial to success here will be a comprehensive integration capability that is highly available, reliable and secure. It should marry existing legacy applications and services with the new digital ecosystem that will drive enterprise innovation. This approach enables the different business and technical platform services to evolve at their own pace, unlocking the opportunity to pursue rapid innovation and customer engagement.

The DIF platform enables the intersection of ongoing change and the embracing of new technologies as they arise. Furthermore, the DIF future-proofs investment by establishing the ability to easily evolve and integrate systems and services in a sustainable and flexible manner going forward.

What it truly means to ‘think platform’

By developing a Thinking Platform approach across the organisation — one that introduces standardised processes and establishes a Digital Integration Fabric — organisations can substantially increase their agility and flexibility while maximising performance. This approach means:

• Business can drive accelerated focus on producing applications that differentiate the bank and drive higher shareholder return rather than duplicating standard common capability.

• Application development complexity is reduced through the consumption of services through published APIs.

• Scarce resources can be appropriately aligned and specialised in a business capability, understanding the link between the business outcome and the system platform.

• Talent attraction and retention becomes easier due to the API-enabled platform ecosystem — IT resources can consume IT services in a manner consistent within leading industry and development frameworks.

• Each platform team can set their own velocity and speed of operations with certainty of purpose through defined service level agreements.

A platform approach, when adopted across an organisation provides strategic business and technical capabilities required to underpin a new operating model. A platform means different things to different people, based on a person’s role and responsibility in the organisation, delivering specific value to stakeholder groups. Overarching business benefits include enhanced end user experience (internal and external), speed of change, greater efficiency and improved risk profile.

Bringing platform, culture and leadership together to enable agility, design thinking and innovation in the digital economy, is imperative to remain competitive and build a sustainable business model in today’s landscape.

Contact DXC Technology to accelerate your digital transformation journey and embed a platform approach across your organisation.

About DXC Technology

DXC Technology (DXC: NYSE) is the world’s leading independent, end-to-end IT services company, helping clients harness the power of innovation to thrive on change. Created by the merger of CSC and the Enterprise Services business of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, DXC Technology serves nearly 6,000 private and public sector clients across 70 countries. The company’s technology independence, global talent and extensive partner network combine to deliver powerful next-generation IT services and solutions. DXC Technology is recognized among the best corporate citizens globally. For more information, visit www.dxc.technology.

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