Implications for enterprise architecture
Each of the four levers poses a substantial challenge for IT. For example, many banking-product lines—among them credit cards, investments, and checking and savings accounts—are managed in silos. This makes it difficult to get a comprehensive view of customers quickly, for example, to assess their loan applications. What’s more, channels are often managed and tracked independently, complicating matters for customers who wish to use multiple channels as they pursue a transaction. For instance, customers starting a loan application on their smartphones may find that they have to reenter data when they switch to desktop computers to fill in the more detailed information required. Weak systems integration and slow database-access times can prevent customers from enjoying a real-time shopping and purchasing experience. Analytics capabilities are especially difficult to integrate with operational process flows. Manual steps in these processes, such as rekeying and transferring information, present major obstacles to both analytics and automation of processes.
While a few players have overcome some of these hurdles, it is a big challenge for many IT executives to implement all four levers so customers can, for instance, purchase individually tailored products across multiple channels. One important reason is that the legacy IT architecture and organization, for example, which runs the supply-chain and operations systems responsible for executing online product orders, lacks the speed and flexibility needed in the digital marketplace.
Indeed, the ability to offer new products on a timely basis has become an important competitive factor; this might require weekly software releases for an e-commerce platform. That kind of speed can only be achieved with an inherently error-prone software-development approach of testing, failing, learning, adapting, and iterating rapidly. It’s hard to imagine that experimental approach applied to legacy systems. Nor would it be appropriate, because the demand for perfection is far higher in key back-end legacy systems. Quality, measured by the number of IT system errors, and resilience, measured by the availability and stability of IT infrastructure services, comes at slow speed but is critical for risk- and regulatory-compliance management and for core transactional activities such as finance and online sales. In contrast, lower IT-system quality and resilience can be acceptable in customer-facing areas, for instance, when users participate in the testing of new software. For these reasons, many companies need an IT architecture that can operate at different speeds.