CIOs Juggle More Demands Faster and Smarter with Enterprise Product Agility

The recent Bank Systems & Technology Executive Summit in San Diego was a great reminder of the daunting breadth and number of issues facing today’s CIO’s and senior technology executives.  Below is a partial list of the key issues that were discussed at the summit:

• Continued Regulatory change and uncertainty (with no end in sight)
• Increased emphasis on risk management (process controls and audit/reporting)
• How to leverage/participate-in Social Media such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others
• Accelerating adoption of Smartphone mobile platforms and providing applications to support
• Keeping pace with product/service innovations like remote deposit capture, mobile payments, PFM, and more…..
• Accelerating growth in the sheer volume of data to be stored and managed by the enterprise
• Corporate support for new devices such as Apple’s iPad

There was a time when senior business executives created and executed against five year plans with tactics focused at least on the business quarter time horizon.  Today’s CIO’s and senior IT executives do not have this luxury.  The pace of change is much faster and the degrees of uncertainty much higher.

In the Strategic Issues workshop focused on Data Everywhere, one of the presenters spoke about the IDC The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready? Report from May 2010. Data in the current digital universe is estimated at 1.2 zettabytes and growing fast.  The same study also estimated that around 75% of this data is redundant, duplicate copies of other data.

There were a couple of excellent sessions on Social Media adoption and how Social Media is changing how banks can communicate with and learn from their customers and how loyal customers will strongly advocate for their bank as well.  Questions arose such as: how can banks leverage this information about customers’ preferences, attitudes and interaction patterns?

During another session, one bank described a quadrupling adoption of mobile banking usage in just one year.  It was estimated that there are 234 million cell phones in the U.S and that eventually all of these will be Smartphones capable of mobile banking.  What new products and services will be needed to feed this growing platform?

The Summit provided a great opportunity for education, networking and learning. Through conversations with multiple CIOs, it became clear that today’s CIOs and senior IT executives think first and foremost about the business of banking and how they can serve that business by enabling innovation and providing infrastructure for growth.  They want to be a conduit for growth, not a barrier or roadblock for change.

But are these goals realistic given all of the uncertainties listed above?

One of the key values emerging from all of these forces is agility.  Banks can’t foresee the final state of regulatory change or how fast Smartphone adoption will change interaction patterns or how social media customer feedback will help to shape future product/service design.  Since banks can’t identify specific detailed outcomes to these challenges and plan for these, they are increasingly working towards implementing the flexible and responsive processes and supporting technologies in order to provide the fastest and smartest response to existing and future challenges as they arise.

This move to more agile processes and platforms is underway in many areas of banking.  A key discipline that can benefit from increased agility is product development and management.  In most large banks the “universe of product information” follows the statistics provided within the IDC report mentioned earlier.  Typically there is a lot of data in many different systems and 75% of it is probably duplicated, redundant or even worse out-dated which leads to high costs and additional time to market for new or modified banking products.  New products and product changes take longer and cost more as product information is dispersed and duplicated across the organization.

At Camilion Solutions we believe there is a smarter way for banks to develop and manage their products in keeping with accelerating regulatory, market and customer demands. Enterprise Product Agility is the ability to drive relevant compliant products to the right customers ahead of the competition at speed and volume. With flexible product configuration at the foundation, banks can build a central product repository where complete product definitions are stored. By shifting from coding to configuring products and by inheriting and re-using existing product components such as calculations, forms, rates, etc., banks can launch new or modified products much faster and easier.

To read more download our white paper: Surviving and Thriving with Enterprise Product Agility

'Enterprise Product Agility is the ability to drive relevant compliant products to the right customers ahead of the competition at speed and volume.'