Category: Digital Transformation

Moving to the cloud – what are the priorities?

Cloud based IT systems were part of the IT strategies already some years ago. With the recent global agenda caused by lockdown and working from home, cloud strategies were even more pushed by CIO’s.

However, there is a conflict in addressing the new situation. On one hand, companies were busy to set up business continuity management, ensuring that companies suffer minimum impact from the lockdown. Public cloud solutions became the most popular one because companies could switch fast and enable employees to work remotely from home.

On the other hand, budgets become frozen and working from home orders postponed new projects in the pipeline in a “wait and see” mode. As a consequence, growth and innovation projects are cut and projects dedicated to run the business are impacted from budget cuts.

Nevertheless, companies still plan to move workloads to the cloud also as a response to push above all the digital transformation agenda and increase the pace. The question is whether cloud resistant back end and core applications are ready to move to the cloud. Companies evaluate on top the advantages of cloud services such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and data analytics.

Public cloud has the highest priority and is the preferred model and becoming omnipresent. It is followed by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning initiatives, then followed by private cloud and multi cloud. Nevertheless, most companies follow a multi cloud strategy since they are using multiple public and private clouds for different application workloads.

Companies already decided to move the cloud a couple of years ago and more than two third of all organizations are using the cloud today, however, the priorities changed as seen above and the plan is to shift in parts. Focus is on a modernization approach of the IT landscape.

Where there was a general reluctance regarding security, data protection and risks of dependency towards cloud vendor providers, management buy-in became easier because cloud value propositions are now driven as cost savings initiatives, which reflects the current situation of focusing more on cost savings instead revenue growth.

The game has changed because business needs to provide a reason now why not to migrate to the cloud. Technology is overruling business priority. Even if there is “only” a lift and shift approach for an IT Information System to move to the public cloud, as long as it could save costs, the project is sponsored.

Another driver is the experience of towards remote work. The lockdown has proved that remote work is possible without large impacts despite the earlier doubts before the lockdown. This is another argument to move to the cloud.

Still, business continuity is top priority, but the mind shift from seeing cloud as a cost saving and strategic value only has moved to see cloud as the new standard to work in the future.

It is today easier to argue that business transformation is easier using cloud technologies and add customer value. Once the quick wins become visible, businesses will continue to move more applications to the cloud. The pandemic situation is only a trigger to pull technology forward.

For many companies that rushed into the cloud at the height of the pandemic, the primary goal was enabling employees to work from home, so business could still function. That does not mean that the shift was perfect.

The focus is more related to business continuity, process adaption to the new situation and working from home. Therefore, it is not a black or white approach towards the cloud. Companies will increase cloud adoption where necessary and not just because of a cloud dogma. Since the focus is on cost control, cloud business cases and prove of concepts will provide more value to move forward.

Existing cloud solutions will be optimized and restructured towards cost savings, the way forward is not only addressing new cloud initiatives but both. Every spending is on the radar, including technology.

Companies continue their journey to the cloud and we are now in the stage of translating the cloud strategy into real actions and steps.

The times of theoretical cloud school lessons are over.

Companies are now recognizing the opportunities for platform based innovation across the entire spectrum of cloud services including data center infrastructure management. Vendors respond with project pre-financing and security disaster recovery checks to make it easier for customers to continue with their cloud engagements.

According to Spiceworks, the top priorities where large companies expect support from cloud vendors are:

  • Maintaining data security: 47%
  • Complying with data regulations: 34%
  • Migrating workloads to the cloud: 28%
  • Managing multiple cloud solutions: 15%
  • Optimizing cloud workloads: 11%
  • Managing cloud spend: 11%
  • Modernizing cloud infrastructure: 11%

For cloud service providers, it is very important to respond to risks of data security, risks of vendor lock-in by focusing on solutions which keep organizations top priorities to remain flexible in uncertain times. With the increased emphasis on remote work, cloud has become more important than ever. Not only to support remote and mobile access, but also to improve collaboration.

Next Level Information Management: Changing a tanker into speed boats

Changing a tanker into speed boats

As a leader you may think that “yeah, I heard about all this agile, flexibility, empowerment and all these buzzwords. But how to change an IT landscape which is like a “tanker” to “speed boats” in times of uncertainty and faster changes?

Assuming replacing your ERP backbone system is not an option, you need to address opportunities, risks and challenges in your strategy of enhancing your ERP and IT landscape.

Which technology is the best solution? Consider best of breed or adding new modules of existing ERP providers through software evaluation. More than 20 years ago, the best of breed approach was “en vogue” whereas during the recent years, adding products from the existing ERP providers became more standard approach.

When considering the “speed boat” approach, ask yourself the following questions:

  • What data streams do I need to consider?
  • What data volume should be processed?
  • Is data distribution important?
  • What are the compliance, GDPR and security considerations?
  • Where does the data occur?
  • Which data is about write or read?

Once the appropriate technology and the business requirements are aligned, you can start focusing on the required skills to address the differences between the existing IT landscape against the underlying paradigms and technologies of the enhancements or new software required.

You will achieve this better by letting your IT people experiment, fail, learn fast and experiment again until you can continue on the benefits gained.

Typical projects consider prove of concepts and pilots to validate the readiness, functionality and utility of advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

For example, if your team helps to shape the future of your IT strategy, you need to ensure the solutions always consider the whole company and community worldwide.

If we allow the experimental mode, we should not do it isolated but with consideration of benefits for the whole company, subsidiaries, business stakeholders and affiliates.

The next consideration is to ensure that the new solution fits to the existing landscape requirements and the end to end processes and systems, including interfaces and platforms. Collaboration is required between the IT solution streams, functional streams, business, service providers and off-shore teams in order to guarantee the deliverables with full transparency on status and risk management. The new solution needs to take the existing enterprise architecture into consideration. Transition from the existing and the new processes and systems is a key part of these new kind of projects.

Moving to collaboration means working with both internal IT and external IT (service provider) and business counterparts.

For low risk and high volume services, companies tend to give full control to their cloud service providers for hosting and processing the data inclusive managing security. For critical applications and multinational companies with a larger IT expertise, the internal IT staff does not only manage the on premises and in house applications but also manage parts of what is hosted outside with the cloud service provider. They collaborate on agreements for several topics such as data maintenance, security and governance and manage together applications and data to deploy on the service provider’s cloud environment.

At least one IT team member represents the IT point of view to the business and a member of the different business streams represents business to the IT teams. This is mainly required when it comes to BI, analytics and reporting. The same applies to testing such as test strategies, test plans and test execution.

The security and governance policies inside the data centers should be periodically reviewed and based on lessons learnt with the cloud service providers extended or changed. Companies do not need to reinvent these security policies and governance as vendors do provide tools to manage and configure them. It is more about taking the existing policies and adapt them to the SLA’s with the vendors, taking the new cloud part into consideration. At the end of the day, the security policies and governance applies for the whole hybrid cloud infrastructure and governance is all about how you control information and data.

That is why it is so important to first understand, agree and configure security and governance before moving applications and data to the cloud.

Especially in the SaaS area, where businesses independently sign up for cloud services, they end up being totally exposed to the security and governance service level dictated by the cloud service provider and internal IT face integration issues when data needs to be moved between legacy, on premises and cloud applications.

Your change manager will support both IT and business and aligns with the program manager regarding the program change management process, the PMO in progress reporting and in other project management activities such as RAID (Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies) and project plans. This also includes managing the engagement of stakeholders and senior management.

As a summary, we are moving away from large and inflexible IT projects to more constantly looking for improvements in the new ways of working by taking processes, people, tools and organizations into consideration when elaborating and implementing digital and operational transformation, strategy adoption and alignment.

Next Level Information Management: Moving from IT Services to Business Challengers

ERP systems are in the dead end

A couple of years ago, when we helped a client in the Middle East to select the appropriate ERP and EMR system, we evaluated the big players such as Oracle, SAP and some niche players like Infor. Already by that time, the systems were big, monolithic and inflexible.

And it was not too long ago when we proudly moved the ERP system to a global single instance and some clients outsourced it to a managed cloud. It was a lot about standardization and cost savings, and today it is still about standardization and cost savings, however, these monolithic system nowadays cannot adapt to the real process and system requirements from the business. In addition, the complexity and data volume increases exponentially.

So on one hand the IT standardization seemed to be the right direction and the process adaption was underestimated. Spending more budget to standardize IT systems and migrate ERP systems to newer releases does not necessarily mean that the processes were improved because they did not reflect the changes through digitalization enough.

On the other hand, to replace an ERP system which has been implemented in the nineties with standardized processes is politically and technically difficult, especially when the company is using centralized and standardized systems and now needs to respond to a more agile and fast changing world out there.

CIO’s are now challenged with monolithic ERP systems: where can we add value and remain economically?

How do we transform our ERP landscape to enable an intelligent enterprise?

Let’s assume you define and develop ERP roadmaps in order to simplify, standardize and automate business processes and systems by leveraging industry and best practices. You do not replace and redo but you start about rethinking and redesigning your backbone of your company.

Where to start?

The first three questions you need to think about, despite any budget restrictions, is commerciality, role of your IT team and results.

  1. Where does our IT add value?
  2. How can we work as one team instead of a bunch of individuals?
  3. Results: do we deliver a profit at the bottom line? Where and how can we make our contribution?

In order to achieve this, you need to provide the quality of being trusted and believed in. It is all about credibility by making the right decisions on skills and capabilities of your teams.

The bridge to get there is to start with the data. What are we doing with the data? You need to lead by example, inspire your people that they could become better than they ever thought.

So you start from a new mind setting to go from a classic IT Service to a challenger role. If you compare to the past initiatives, which were often those mega programs which did not bring the expected results, you change the approach into smaller initiatives – becoming more agile, flexible and keep learning. Move skills fast and stay customer focused by setting a product to a service.

Fail fast and learn fast.

You must lead by example, otherwise you team will not follow you. Communicate the framework, ensure you invest in the right skills and trust your team and let them do.

However, breaking large IT initiatives into smaller pieces contains risks of giving up more control and needs a change in the mind shifts in order to respond faster to the outside changes. For example, if you consider the 3rd question about profit, you will face difficulties if you did not communicate the “why”. Leading by example means you need to provide purpose and gain the trust of your people you are working with.

Changing the perspective

To change the perspective, you need to understand where you are today and where you want to go. How are companies changing the way they work when the world has changed as we never seen it before and the way to implement the strategy as well?

How can companies applying the industry shift?

If we look at the challenges companies are facing today, a large number of them are in part due to the board and management not recognizing how an Industry is changing and what it will mean for their future.

Looking at the future, the approach taking place due to technology between industries mean that traditional ways of looking at competition and substitutes are not enough.

A starting point could be to look at different dimensions where you are today and where you need to transform towards developing new capabilities. This will help companies to make decisions moving in the right direction.

Dimension Today’s analysis methods Industry shift to innovation
Mindset Analytical, logical and linear Creative and disruptive
Ambitions Logical Offensive
Future considerations Stable, expected to be like in the present Unstable, expected to be different
People perspective Rational Purpose and Passion
Business models Preserve and fine tuning existing business models Develop and test pilot projects of new business models
Example of tools SWOT

PESTEL

Value chain

Porter’s Five Forces framework

 Disruptive Innovation

Business Model Canvas

Strategy Innovation Canvas

Innovation Pyramid
Level of change required Difficult, expect resistance Love to create it, make change happen
Sources of Experts supporting this approach Michael Porter

Harvard Business School

 Gary Hamel

Rita Mc Grath

London Business School

 

This framework does not mean companies have to abolish every approach they follow today, it should help to highlight where to break the old thinking paradigms and provide a starting point for the transition towards creativity and innovation which are critical for responding to the new challenges.

Communicating the framework

Before communicating the framework, companies need to map their purpose, ownership, resource allocation, competencies, strategic and cultural fit, deal flow and assessment to the capabilities required to implement the change. This is lot about what companies expect, what they need and how they plan to go about getting it.

So what is this about the mindset shifts in an agile, flexible and learning environment?

Communicating the framework, you need to consider the following:

  1. How do we move from pure profit thinking to purpose?

If the purpose is clearly communicated, the profit will be more likely achieved because they know where to focus on.

  1. How to we move from strict and inflexible hierarchies to networks of collaboration?

This goes back to giving up full control, trust your people and let them do. It is actually giving more power to your departments, countries and affiliates instead of communicating orders from the head office. As a CIO you act more as a coach who enables people to become more stable in a challenger role instead of only being regarded as IT Service or other supporting functions.

  1. How do we move from a strict controlling to an empowering environment?

This is about overcoming the conflict between the powerful controllers and finance people, who lead by Excel, however it turns out to be counterproductive if people are not empowered to act agile, flexible and more independent. As a CIO, if you do not trust your people, you will not be able to empower them.

  1. How do we move from planning to experimentation?

In the times we live today, long term plans became obsolete and short term plans are difficult to predict. Believing in your people means to give them freedom to experiment, taking into consideration that they may fail. Just remember the rule: you can fail, but fail fast and learn fast. This is a part of the framework – we do allow to experiment but we watch carefully to interfere when it is time to stop, learn from the mistakes and move forward.

  1. How do we move from privacy to transparency?

I have often seen how head office people were hiding full information to their subsidiaries in order to protect their power. This behavior is contradictory in times where you will only succeed in empowering your subordinates in order to remain successful in uncertain and fast changing times. Transparency works on both sides. Your subordinates become also transparent, hence there is enough information to step in when a correction is required.

Trust me, I am your robo-advisor

Do you already take advantage of your robo-advisor? Is this a new AI (artificial intelligence) monster or a declaration of bankruptcy to my financial advisor?

We are living in new times and new technologies drive new business models. Robo-advisors are one of these financial advisor services, which automatically manage your financial portfolio. Robo-advisors emerged around 10 years ago and today there are over 100 different robo-advisory services.

What is a robo-advisor?

A robo-advisor is per definition an online application that provides automated financial guidance and services. The digital financial advice is based on mathematical rules and algorithms executed by a software and therefore does not require a human advisor. The software utilizes its algorithms to automatically allocate, manage and optimize clients’ assets.

How does it work?

The easiest approach using a robo-advisor is quite simple. First step is the investors profile, second step is the automated advice. The client fills online a short questionnaire and determines the risk of his investment and expected return. The one example I know are 8 questions which are based on behavioral economics and brain research.

The entry stage is to reflect listed ETF’s (Exchange Traded Funds). Hence the investment will follow the stock or bond indices. The underlying investment consists of bonds and equities in a rule based asset management, you can also call it a passive investment in indexed funds.

Most robo-advisors act as intermediaries between their clients and their portfolio, which you already have with your bank. They do not have a bank license, which has high restrictions to obtain.

If the investors prefer more sophisticated advice, they can go for more dedicated fund management or more complex automatisms such as algorithm based adjustments, re-balancing proposals or predefined rule sets for investments. Also the underlying investments of bonds and equities will be enhanced with currencies, commodities and other assets.

Today, most clients follow automated investment advice with integrated account management and either active or passive portfolio management.

The more artificial intelligence is built in, the more self-learning algorithms will start shifting assets automatically and fully automated investments will take place. Sounds scary? Not really. Clients can choose between active and passive management styles. You can choose also both.

The passive management style keeps his predefined parameters and restores the asset mix on a frequent basis. It aims a long term growth by basically following the markets. Refer to the example further below in this article.

The active management style is livelier by a constant data collection and analysis of the market as feeders to the algorithms, which propose shifts in the asset allocation. It aims to outperform the market by basically focusing on a higher beta factor.

The question is how well are the machine learning techniques continuously improving their algorithms in order to improve the performance?

When intelligent machines do all of your work, what will we do all day?

Have you thought about what you actually want?

Why should we use a robo-advisor?

The main argument in favor of a robo-advisor is the cost / performance ratio. Because of a moderate to minimal human intervention, they have a much smaller service fee structure than traditional human advice. If you follow a very simple approach on ETF’s only, your management fee will be much lower. The more complexity you add, even if it is automated, the higher the fees will be. A higher degree of diversification will promise a higher chance of outperforming the market. However, it is certainly more cost intensive to manage multiple investment vehicles compared to reflecting an ETF only.

In most cases, a human client advisor follows the recommendation of his bank, based on external or in-house research. This is human and cost intensive and often the performance is not better than comparable indices.

People who are in favor of robo-advisors will tell you to digitize yourself before you get “kodaked”. The famous Kodak Company did not adapt fast enough to the merge of digital photography in the nineties and went bankrupt a couple of years ago. Same arguments are used with the hotel industry and Airbnb or Uber with the taxis. Personally, I don’t believe companies like Marriott will go bankrupt because of Airbnb, however, in certain segments, they will get hurt.

The travel industry déjà-vu in wealth management

The financial industry goes through a period of disruption, where you can see the impact in new business models, new processes, and new ways of engaging with clients. The critical foundation of data currently succeeds the digital transformation. It is similar to the travel industry which went through a large paradigm shift starting around 30 years ago. The travel and tourism business shifted from old mass holiday packages to new customized ways of travel. Consumers became the new drivers using the power of the internet to compare products and services at their fingertips.

Today, the new competitors of the wealth managers are the Googles and Amazons, who know more about their clients than the bankers.

The new art of wealth management is to take a part of the value chain and digitalize it. The Finance industry, however, is not yet standardized like the Ubers and Airbnb’s. It is still a kind of national business, even though we have EU law directives such as MiFID (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) in place.

If the robo-advisor is not performing, you can blame the market taking the scenario that the robo-advisor has a simple investment approach such as reflecting an index with ETF’s. In case the investment approach is more complex, you can blame the algorithms.  Do you still believe you can blame your wealth manager? Do you have a trust based relationship with a tolerance for mistakes, because you prefer to deal with a human being instead of a machine? If a mistake happens, the bank would never admit to it unless you go to court to prove it. The complexity is increasing due to growing regulations and compliance requirements. Automatization is transparency and you can reduce legal and compliance issues.

The way a robo-advisor should be seen from a banks perspective is like an Uber for wealth management. There should be no custody, no trading and no legacy. The value chain falls apart. If you are a Swiss based robo-advisor, your digital radius is not limited but due to the national varieties ideally in Switzerland. The infrastructure and facility managers of a bank will think twice whether they want to invest 2-3 Mio. in building a new physical subsidiary, which has a physical radius of 1 km instead of investing the same amount in their robo-advisory products which has a much larger digital radius. Ok, you can argue that we are not comparing apples with apples, however, we need to understand that businesses will take more and more advantage of virtual value chains and move towards digital business models. This also goes hand in hand with an increased acceptance of e-banking if there is a value add such as simple, fast and practical management of financial transactions, whether you are on the move or at home.

Most robo-advisor companies offer their services on a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform and follow the approach robot, scale and automate. They don’t “make” a good asset management. Their mind set is let others (robo-advisors) do it. It is like Uber, who do not own the fleet of taxis, but are taking the advantage of data generation with radical changes.

Is data the new differentiator?

If a robo-advisor can take advantage of the disruptive power of data, do you believe it may be able to replace your financial advisor? One reason is the explosion of data volume. Are we able to manage this rapid growth in order to keep with the data volume? Employees and investors are also moving from data producers to consumers of reports and data users.

Another complexity is where the data is coming from such as mobile devices, social media and the internet of things through online streaming. All these devices slowly adapt to artificial intelligence and machine learning. No one will know where the data came from, once moved to the cloud. If you offer a robo-advisor from Switzerland and operate in the cloud, you need a sole Swiss FINMA (Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority) approved cloud to differentiate from your other robo-advisor competitors.

Most financial institutions are struggling with replacing their legacy systems in order to keep pace with the disruptive changes. Mainframes cannot be easily replaced when the code has been developed and maintained in-house for many years or captured in specific applications which are not supported anymore.  This is why you will find so many data warehouse projects, where you need to extract data from many different feeder systems, transform it to a useful meaning and usage. Then you need to load it to an environment where you can easily produce reports and relevant information from. A robo-advisor, acting as an intermediary, does not have these typical legacy or infrastructure problems.

Robo-advisors are useless if you didn’t do your homework such as proper data integration, data quality, managing master data, managing data security, managing the large volume of big data and manage it all in a secured cloud.

The human factor can be a risk because we are emotional beings. Every wrong decision is the basis for many more and in most cases wrong decisions to follow. Bad luck attracts misfortune and success attracts success.

Example

A good example to see how robo-advisors come into effect is a joint approach. In this case we look at mainly four different vendors with their expertise in a certain part of the value chain.

The Swiss based insurer Elvia, a subsidiary of the Allianz Group, offers a pure digital investment product for private investors. Clients set their investment goals and determine their personal risk profile.

The robo-advisor technology is based on a SaaS offer, which comes from a Zurich based company called additiv. The product is named additiv DFS (Digital Finance Suite).

Another part of the value chain has been developed by a Swedish credit management and cash collection company called Intrum Justitia and consists of a video identification solution and the ability to qualify electronic signatures to fulfill the client onboarding process.

Anyone wishing to register with this new robo-advisor product can do so via their desktop or smartphone. For the end customer, the process takes a few minutes. During the video chat, a picture of the ID card is taken, the person is identified via software and the contract is also signed.

Last but not least, the custodian bank is Saxo Bank Switzerland.

The insurer can offer a completely digital investment product, which is also distributed online. The target group are long-term orientated private investors. The customers determine their starting amount, their investment objective and their personal risk profile online. Based on the customer’s investment strategy, the insurer invests in appropriate Exchange Traded Funds (ETF’s), managed by the custodian bank.

To sum up, the insurer did not develop the whole product in-house but took rather a best in breed approach to pass the digitization benefits to their customers. They choose the experts in Fintech for the robo-advisor, video recognition and e-signing solution for the KYC (know your customer) and onboarding process and a custodian bank, which provides the ETF’s or any other investment product chosen.

Conclusion

The polarity is not only in society but also in the wealth management industry. The good old days of red carpet retail banking are gone. A private client with less than 1 Mio. in assets will receive the standardized mass products from his bank and could instead easily invest a large portion into an automated vehicle like a robo-advisor. Of course, the bank will give you the impression that with a fortune of 100’000 you will receive private banking attention, however, the products and advise you have access to are standardized.

Only clients with a large amount of assets will receive access to real professional high profile private bankers with sophisticated and individualized research. I have worked along a couple of projects, which were dedicated to ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWI) and got prioritized in the program.

The increasing number of robo-advisors will more and more penetrate the financial consulting industry. Not only because of the speed, but mainly because of disrupting traditional business models.

Recommendation

New is not what is new, but what is perceived as new. If a tool can plan, analyze and forecast in real time across the financial markets with sophisticated algorithms, why should you pay higher fees just because human monitoring and intervention does not add any additional value?

The great thing about private banking and a personal advisor is that we as humans seek social contacts. If a client advisor can read you and between the lines of what you are saying, you may find solutions which a robo-advisor cannot come up with. If investment advisors will not increase on the holistic quality of reading people’s requirements and find investment solutions outside of the box, they will eventually be replaced by robo-advisors. It will be difficult to justify your fees if you cannot beat the machine.

A good personal client advisor requires good judgement and experience. They can take the client’s perspective without pushing their products and really take care of security, perceivability and usability of understanding when robo-advisory makes more sense instead of personal advice.

Personal client advisors will face more and more cost pressures and in the meantime an uncontrolled growth of new regulatory requirements. It will become more difficult to defend the old way of serving clients. You need to stay innovative in order to survive.

If smart bankers and IT cracks come together and think about how we can increase efficiency in managing assets, robo-advisors will certainly impact more the finance industry in the future.

What is your personal experience? Do you use robo-advisors? Feel free to leave your comments.