Cross the Private-Public Chasm - Analytics Cloud Activation
Have you felt this increasing push of mails and events that want to shove you and your organization more to the cloud than ever before? Whether it is the aftermath of our pandemic induced work from home or the economic struggle, many companies now face to reduce cost, in many a report and white-paper the move to a cloud-based infrastructure is seen as a synonym to digitization. And while I am a believer in solid and carefully crafted cloud strategies, I am far away from equaling these two aspects of a firm‘s digital journey. Let‘s take a closer look at how cloud enablement and data savviness can work alongside or when they start to bully each other:
- The Supportive Scenario - is an alternative to the binary "either-or" that aims for balanced and lock-step implementation of future-proof technology with leading-edge business value creation. And it works even if it is a brand new technology that has not been used before at a firm. Breaking down mid-term strategic objectives into small, bite-sized pieces that further both the platform/infrastructure side of tech projects as well as the functional/business aspect. And on top deliver both domains (business and infra) in a fast and iterative cadence of 4-6 weeks. Just imagine creating a joint agenda that gets support and buy-in from business sponsors, architects and security experts in the same way. Sounds too good to be true?
We have proven it for the following aspects in traditional organizations:
- implementing a hybrid cloud strategy while designing a "next best action" recommender for a private bank
- starting a real-time analytics infrastructure while introducing a "daily liquidity optimizer" algorithm
- spawn a micro-service architecture while building a complex classification machine learning model
2. The Destructive Scenario - in many companies these days, it is all about budgets and people power. Who gets how much and even more who gets whom to chase which strategic objective. And as organizations are complex political animals, clear and good ambitions often translate into political weight and eventually into careers made or lost. How to arrive at a glorious target state along an enterprise‘s strategy is a prime example of conflicting goals. It is almost never possible to start from a greenfield, blank slate kind of position, at least if you‘re not that "built-from-scratch-FinTech" with a solidly funded two-year runway. Hence it often leads to the unhealthy discussion of what "foundation level investments" are and how they need to precede any functional or business value-generating investments.
We often come across the following ideas and statements at client organizations:
- we need to secure baseline funding for infrastructure type of investments
- we cannot generate meaningful business outcome during the first x months or years (depending on your organization)
- if we decide against an "infrastructure-first" approach we will never get off our outdated platform later
Blanket statement warning: These types of comments should raise flashing red warning lights and sirens in everybody‘s eyes and ears observing such statements. The moment you pitch base infrastructure investments against the business value (or the other way round for that matter), you enter dangerous territory.
So beware whenever you come across absolutes in your own organization. Usually combining multiple strategic goals under one common use case or project is absolutely possible. It obviously is just as true, that this approach has its limits and cannot be scaled indefinitely. But whenever two new streams - one tech and one content stream ideally - join forces the results are rather impressive. Often due to the aligned sponsorship across the organization and often because learning, testing and the resulting benefits start to create a positive reinforcement loop. And done once it can be repeated even more easily the second and third time around.
I am curious about your views and experience. So if you have experienced similar or completely opposed cases, drop me an email and let‘s see, where your path diverged from the common cases outlined above. And if you are especially interested to further your hybrid cloud strategy and to cross the gap in your information security policy to move to the cloud, you can read this excellent overview from ISG Research. And you should note, that we, Integration Alpha and ferris.ai, are currently missing from this overview, but still are ready to explain our approach in detail.
P.S. And if you awake from a refreshing night’s sleep thinking where does FinTech meet Philosophy, listen to our "Hole in the Whole" podcast.