The Financial Services (FS) industry has seen sweeping technology-led changes over the past few years - and more changes are coming as AI, robotics, and blockchain evolve and digital becomes the new norm. For FS CIOs, agendas have also changed. Traditional responsibilities, such as ensuring systems are always ready to support the business, are still the norm. But now they must manage complex technology transformations and big change initiatives. Not an easy feat given the complex, interconnected web of technologies, delivery models, and processes that run the business.
Today, a change, whether it be an improvement rollout, security update, or new system addition, is fraught with risk. While many service disruptions are minor and can be quickly rectified, some can have enormous ramifications for the business, including dramatic shifts in customer perception, brand value, financial loss, and at the extreme, regulatory censure. Of even greater concern is the impact a failure can have on businesses, customers, and a country’s economy.
Why is Managing Technology Change So Risky?
Part of the reason technology transformations and big change initiatives have become so complicated is the tools being used to manage them. Traditional tools, such as Excel spreadsheets, project management software, emails, and phone calls, rely heavily on human involvement to plan and execute human activities, business processes, and machine functions. Chasing status updates through phone calls and emails means the team is constantly working from outdated information and wasting time trying to collect and assemble the information. When disaster hits and teams are forced to comb
through their data to determine where things went wrong, what was previously hidden becomes all too obvious in review.
To reduce the risk of IT failure and enable teams to succeed, they need a platform that helps plan and rehearse activities before going live, enables better communication and collaboration, supports resources management, and provides a real-time picture of every aspect of the change process as it develops.
In our latest white paper - Work Orchestration & Observability Become Critical for Operational Resilience in Financial Services - we discuss why the FS industry is facing more IT failures and some of the ramifications, including closer regulatory scrutiny. The paper introduces the need for a work orchestration and observability platform to manage both human and machine actions involved in technology transformations and big change initiatives. With its many valuable capabilities, Cutover can improve IT teams' efficiency and effectiveness, help eliminate disruptive failures, and bring operational resilience to the FS industry.