Overview
The client, a global tier 1 bank, needed to define a target architecture and roadmap for its Commercial Lending domain.
The goal was to develop an architecture strategy that encompassed all Commercial Lending customer segments and products. Importantly, this needed to specify the current state, define a target that addressed issues appropriately, and provide a roadmap that aligned urgent business and architecture priorities.
Icon has delivered numerous architecture and strategy engagements across the bank, always underpinned by an objective and transparent approach.
As a result of this history, and recognising the advantages of adopting a tried and-tested technology strategy model, the bank engaged Icon to provide the strategic IT consultancy and solution architecture support it required.
The challenge
The client’s group-wide architecture strategy mandated simplification and automation. The challenge was that the current technology landscape for Commercial and Institutional banking presented significant issues.
A particular problem was that the processes for complex corporate customers, which had historically been on-boarded and supported manually, were not coherently documented.
Furthermore, the Domain Architecture Process had become stagnant over time. This meant that a significant amount of time was required to create architecture assets and deliverables that were of limited use within the bank’s domains, and at the wider organisational level.
As a result, the assets generated by this engagement, and the methodology used to create them, needed to be based on a proven operating model. This would ensure they could be used as an exemplar to re-shape the architecture processes to better serve the bank’s individual domains and wider organisation.
The approach
Before defining the target architecture, Icon recognised that the current state
needed to be understood and specified in detail. This was particularly important
because the business processes relating to complex corporate customers were
not supported by IT.
This involved:
-
Significant information gathering across the business and IT domains
-
Categorising and distilling data to produce a complete picture of the architecture, and a prioritised list of the business problems with the current state to identify the ‘motivations for change’
- Specifying a target that remediated all known issues and fully supported
the business across all customer segments - Producing a book of work to provide transparency and a cost estimate
for each item that needed to be created
The output of this process was used to define the roadmap. Work items were
grouped by dependency to produce atomic work packages and mapped to
known business and architectural benefits.
A major requirement from the Domain Architecture Process was the leveraging of ‘architecture as code’. To ensure the solution enabled this, the architectural
assets were therefore backed by a fully traceable data set.
The definition of this data model, and its (partial) population from existing sources,
such as the application catalogue, was critical to generating the current, target,
and transition state diagrams.
The pain point analysis, current, target and transitional state options were meticulously captured by Icon to a forensic level of detail. This was balanced by summary slide packs that explained the business case at an executive-level. These were clear and concise, with traceability to the wealth of analysis detail captured.
Solution and benefits
As a result of this approach, Icon delivered:
- A deep, detailed analysis of the current IT implementation across the Commercial Lending domain, with a transparent,objective prioritisation of the motivations for change
- A complete target architecture specification, including the strategically aligned elements of the current state, that fully addressed all motivations for change, including major functional and business process gaps
- A roadmap to achieve the target, with transition states constructed from atomic work packages (each delivering meaningful business and architectural benefits) which were estimated and costed and will be used to build the business case for investment
