IT Transformation Management for Financial Services & Banking

Making Migrating Thousands Of Assets More Manageable

In the past, the financial services and banking industry have been quick to adopt new technology, thinking about how it can give them a competitive edge. However, implementation of this new technology can be slow whilst organizational constraints and complexity are navigated, and confidence is built about both technology stability and their ability to support it.

• Security: A recent Forrester study has shown that 73% of senior bank managers are holding back on adopting newer technology, such as cloud computing, because of security. With the cringe-worthy number of recent data breaches, it's no wonder that security is a priority. However, security should be the primary driver for IT Transformation projects as outdated software, and unauthorized applications are posing enormous security risks!
• Fear of Failure: The financial services industry is very competitive and commoditized, and there is a lot of pressure for success and control on the IT team which drives project managers to be risk-averse and put in a lot effort into pre-project planning. This means a constant battle between agility and speed against control and risk mitigation.
• Consistent customer experience: Since this is such a competitive service industry with no physical products to sell, customer service is the number one priority. A financial services organization that cannot deliver consistent customer experience across all channels and devices is at risk of losing that customer to the competition.

Besides privacy, risk, and regulation concerns, financial institutions also have some practical considerations to think about before embarking on an IT transformation project:

• Tens of Thousands of Employees: Most major financials have tens of thousands of employees, some even have more than a hundred thousand workers. Migrating all of these users, devices, and apps to a new platform, or even a version upgrade can quickly become a nightmare.
• More locations: Large financial institutions are often global in nature, have hundreds of physical locations, remote employees, and are more distributed than some other industry verticals. For an IT migration, this can prove difficult to manage without an efficient way to track devices, users, and their associated locations.
• A large number of custom-built apps: Because banks and other financial institutions often use proprietary processes, and as clients increasingly demand a seamless integration of online and in-branch banking, IT departments often custom-develop a disproportionate amount of in-house apps, which can be difficult to migrate to a new OS.
• Different data sources: Mergers and acquisitions are common in finance which leads to disparate sources of information, and although the financial industry is more concerned with good governance than most industries, this makes a migration more difficult.

How Can Dashworks Help?

IT Transformation projects are avoidable - but only for a period of time! Having machines run on software or operating systems that have reached their end-of-life or are not supported anymore, puts your organization at serious risk — for example, security breaches, system failures, data loss and software audits to just mention a few. Besides, the pressure to succeed and to provide a consistent experience (e.g., user interface) across all devices quickly means the migration must stay on track and cannot fail.

Dashworks is an IT Transformation Management Tool that allows IT project managers to automate gain an exact overview of the IT landscape by providing a single version of the project truth, enable users to give valuable context with self-service and — most importantly for financial institutions — create tailored migration paths for different types of workers for a speedy but smooth migration process. It also makes the discovery, rationalization, and packaging of the significant amount of internally-built, custom applications easier that can be otherwise very problematic to migrate, especially if they are unlikely to work across different system versions.