Accelerating digital transformation with an enterprise-wide platform approach
Conventional 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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.