Largest Bank in New Zealand, ANZ, embarks on a journey that leads to Yammer
March 26, 2019

Summary

Australia New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) was founded in 1835 and is the seventh largest company in Australia and the largest bank in New Zealand. With over 46,000 employees spread broadly throughout Australia and Asia, the ANZ communications team acted on a renewed desire to increase connection and engagement between their people.

Challenge

ANZ had quickly outgrown their first social enterprise tool. They had learned valuable lessons about what employees needed and wanted and what had to be done to meet strict security and infrastructure requirements. After visiting with both Facebook and Microsoft, the team narrowed their search down to a head-to-head between Workplace by Facebook and Yammer, part of Office 365.

Strategy

Not wanting to be swayed by the in-person demos and instinctual assumptions, the team took a human-centered design approach to selecting the right platform.

ANZ employees span four different generations and the assumption was tool preference would also be split down the middle. But after conducting deep-dive interviews, company-wide surveys, and third party-run user experience testing, Yammer came out as the clear winner over Workplace.

A few of the “nuggets of truth” that came from their discovery were that a company-wide social environment could reduce the risk associated with employees using external social platforms for work purposes. It was important to employees to keep personal and work social engagement separate and Yammer felt more “work-y.” Employees wanted a place that was authentic and safe; a place that felt uniquely ANZ. In addition to these nuggets, the Yammer experience provided functionality and features their employees needed such as being mobile friendly, easy to use, and integrated into their other workflows and systems.

Results

With the user experience at the center of ANZs decision making, vendor relationships and cost were removed from the decision making process. But a nice upside for ANZ – who have recently signed an Office 365 licensing agreement with Microsoft – they already owned Yammer. This allowed for funds that would have been spent on paying Workplace licensing fees being invested in a business development manager, four community managers and a robust change management approach. Following a soft-launch to 22,000 employees in Australia adoption grew to nearly 40% within the first two weeks of making Yammer available.

We realise social groups on Yammer are really important. Social builds community and communities drive change."

– Dan Haynes

Business Improvement Lead, Social Collaboration
ANZ

Top IT spending priorities for 2019

From data analytics to cybersecurity to customer experience, here’s where CIOs will direct their IT budgets this year.

The CIO role continues to grow, thanks in large part to digital transformation, with IT executives adding new responsibilities, ranging from data analytics to product development, according to our 2019 State of the CIO. To meet these goals and continue to innovate, savvy IT leaders must carefully decide which tech investments to make to drive innovation, increase market share, develop and deploy new solutions and meet customer needs.

But where are IT leaders investing to receive the biggest bang for their investment buck? Our survey of 683 heads of IT sheds light on the business initiatives that will be most significant in driving IT investments this year.

Here, we take a look at those numbers and discuss with several CIOs the kinds of technologies they’ll be investing in to bring this year’s business initiatives to fruition.

The business priorities driving IT spend

According to our 2019 State of the CIO survey, increasing operational efficiency and bolstering cybersecurity are among the most significant initiatives driving IT investment this year, with growth-related goals, such as improving profitability and facilitating new product development, and digital-focused efforts, such as transforming business processes and introducing new digital revenues, also key to the top 10 responses:

1. Increase operational efficiency: 40%
2. Increase cybersecurity protections: 40%
3. Improve customer service: 35%
4. Growing the business: 31%
5. Transform existing business processes: 31%
6. Improve profitability: 24%
7. Optimize worker productivity: 20%
8. Introduce new digital revenue streams: 15%
9. Meet compliance requirements (GDPR etc.): 15%
10. Enhancing/enabling new product dev: 13%

To the cloud

For Anthony Peters, IT director at Frank, Rimerman and Co., an accounting, consulting and compliance firm in San Jose, Calif., the drive for greater operational efficiency and improved customer experience will translate into greater investments in the cloud.

“We’re focused on the cloud to take advantage of being able to offload applications for easy deployment, management and scalability,” he says. “Anything we can do to ease that process will help with efficiency and, following on from that, customer experience.”

But like most organizations these days, cybersecurity spend remains vital to the firm. “Security is always a concern, especially in our business, and because of the high-tech clients we serve,” Peters says.

As for eying future growth, Peters and his team will be investing in analytics to help facilitate the firm’s evolution into a data-driven organization.

“We’re going to leverage data analytics to predict the future direction of the firm. We do have some data visualization capabilities already, but we want to take that to the next level and help us to improve service innovation, operational efficiencies and customer experience,” Peters says.

Analytics at the core

Like many IT leaders, Brandon Jones is embarking on a digital journey. The CIO of Worldwide Assurance for Employees of Public Agencies (WAEPA), a nonprofit that facilitates access to insurance for federal employees, is approaching digital transformation via a four-pillar approach, he says.

“We’re going to increase security protections, improve customer experience, transform our existing business and grow the business by building a framework supported by emphasis on relationships with four pillars: our customers, our partners, our employees and IoT [internet of things],” Jones says.

At the center of that framework is what Jones calls business outcome-driven analytics, or BODA. “Based on best practices and input from our strategic partners, we’re really invested in using analytics to understand how these pillars are connected and the relationships between them.”

This effort will include analytics tailored to improve customer experience, systems integration, and back-office and core systems, Jones says. Analytics will also help WAEPA achieve a better understanding of the needs of its customers and partners.

To achieve these goals, Jones will direct investment to data analytics, cloud and security technologies, as well as customer experience tools such as artificial intelligence. “Data analytics, cloud tech and cybersecurity are really important, but we’re also looking at customer experience technology like chatbots and other AI-enabled customer-facing solutions,” he says.

Modernizing processes

For the City of Los Angeles, modernizing essential enterprise systems remains a top priority, so 2019 will be all about addressing operational efficiency, optimizing business practices and securing the public’s data, says Joyce Edson, deputy CIO of the City of Los Angeles Information Technology Agency (ITA).

As a governmental organization, the City’s mandate is to deliver public services efficiently, quickly and securely, Edson says. Therefore, IT efforts will focus on improvement of service delivery and increased efficiency in the provision of that service, as well as the protection of the public and the constituents it serves, along with their associated data.

Edson’s challenge is to achieve these goals in the face of a talent crunch, with large numbers of older workers aging out of the workforce and leaving many roles vacant throughout city government. That means leveraging technology solutions to streamline and automate certain tasks and processes as well as optimize productivity, she says.

“The City of Los Angeles, like many organizations today, is facing the effects of the Baby Boomer generation’s entry in to retirement (Silver Tsunami) and the potential for large numbers of the current workforce leaving City positions,” Edson says. But Edson also sees this as an opportunity to review and improve business processes, an effort that will require technology investments for documenting workflow and processes and to provide assistance in filling the workforce gap.

And because another important government mandate is responsible use of the public fund, Edson and her team will be investing in technology to facilitate greater worker productivity and improve the quality and efficiency of services delivery via that public fund.

XaaS: Making the shift to services-oriented IT

IT orgs are increasingly turning to an ‘everything-as-a-service’ IT delivery model to streamline operations and free up resources for innovation.

When Srini Koushik talks about shifting to internal IT services that employees can access in a self-service model — sometimes referred to as “everything as a service” (XaaS) — he likens it to the saying: “The more things change; the more they stay the same.”

Healthcare is an evolving target, says Koushik, CIO and CTO of Magellan Health, and the need to do things faster, better and cheaper is always at the forefront of everything IT does. XaaS isn’t a new concept — just a growing one, he adds. “It’s the same thing we’ve done before.” But now, “the underlying technology allows us to improve productivity and speed to market. Those are still the key drivers.”

Continuously improving business processes has long been an IT mandate, but now, the ability to mimic the cloud services model and provide services in-house is changing the IT paradigm, thanks to software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and a myriad of other as-a-service offerings.

“We couldn’t do faster, better, cheaper 20 years ago, but you can today, and as a healthcare organization we have embraced it starting with SaaS,’’ which is used in all of Magellan’s business units because of the ease of use it provides, says Koushik.

More organizations are making the shift to offering internal services on demand now because all the necessary pieces have come together, notes George Westerman, a senior lecturer with the MIT Sloan School of Management.

“We have enough bandwidth, the right kinds of APIs and the software services [organizations] are buying are very, very good, so it’s become very clear it’s better to buy from someone than do it yourself,’’ says Westerman, who is also faculty director for Workplace Learning at MIT. “So a wonderful convergence is making this possible.”

Almost six in 10 enterprises now use IaaS, according to February 2019 data by ESG. Continuing the shift to XaaS makes sense because it enhances business agility and increases operational efficiency, according to Deloitte’s "Accelerating agility with XaaS" report.

The firm says XaaS delivers competitive advantage by “democratizing innovation,” because cloud-driven capabilities are less expensive and easier for a broad range of users to access. Seventy-one percent of companies are using XaaS for more than half of their organization’s enterprise IT, according to the report.

Today’s XaaS offerings are also designed to be modular and self-updating and have emboldened IT to build upon them and integrate them with other systems, observers say.

“Just about every company I know has a deal with Amazon, Google or Microsoft,’’ says Westerman, and they’re also using application services from providers like Salesforce or Workday. “I am seeing this really becoming an important element of the offerings of any organization’s [tech] portfolio.”

The impetus for XaaS is largely driven by the demand for consumption models rather than IT having to buy equipment that has to be installed, says Laura Fay, vice president of Research and Advisory, XaaS Product Management, at TSIA. There is also the risk of rolling out an expensive system only to find it doesn’t work the way the business hoped.

“You get the business outcome you want with a subscription and if it doesn’t work out, you can flip to another vendor,” says Fay. “Companies don’t want to spend large amounts of their capital equipment budgets on purchasing technology any more. Buyers are moving from IT to lines of business. The customer is demanding outcomes.”

Providing services in ‘an Amazon-like experience’

Magellan Health’s journey to XaaS began four years ago with PaaS, SaaS, IaaS, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and an internal hybrid cloud, Koushik says. IT now offers 300 services in a catalog that is easily searchable — a must for ‘as a service’ to work, like in the cloud services model, he says. A service might include ordering a computer or terabytes of storage.

The idea was to make it possible for Magellan’s business users to have self-service capabilities and “have an Amazon-like experience,’’ he says. The catalog, known as Rita, for real-time IT agent, was deployed in August 2018.

Another requirement was to streamline the order process and minimize the number of approvals.

“So we’ve taken the requests and made sure they can be fulfilled with one or no approvals,’’ and now about 75 percent require one approval or less, Koushik says.

The last step in the XaaS process is ensuring provisioning becomes automated, he says. Right now, about 90 services are delivered using automation with no human intervention while the rest require some engineering. “We’re trying to push that automatic provisioning to 50 to 60 percent,’’ Koushik says. “It will make significant improvements in speed and effectiveness.”

While the stack of services started with IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, IT has added Magellan-specific processes on top. These are new services that tend to be requests for units of consumption at a much higher level than “‘Give me a server and make sure the server has WordPress installed,’” Koushik says. “We know the server, infrastructure and security profile our customers need so those individual services get combined to a more macro level to take away complexity from end users.”

Just as AWS will ask a user purchasing a cloud instance questions about the amount they need, one of the new Magellan services is a set of questions and the automation and workflow behind it, he says. The idea is to reduce complexity and make the ordering of services faster, high quality and standardized so they can be delivered for less money, he says.

Yet, that intellectual property “is heavy work, and it takes time for us to extract knowledge, simplify, streamline and automate,” he explains.

The more questions a user has to address in the ordering process, the longer they spend away from their work, Koushik adds. “The more we make it easier for employees to do their job without having to worry about the details of how things get put together, the more successful we are in IT.” That leads to more empowered employees, he says.

BPM offered as a service

Like Koushik, Bob Pick, sees the concept of everything as a service as “a replay on everything old is new again.” Pick is senior vice president and CIO at TMNA Services, which provides shared services, including financial, legal and IT to the insurance writing subsidiaries of Tokio Marine North America.

It’s the nuance and sophistication of delivering XaaS that is new, he observes.

TMNA has rolled out a service called “user acceptance,” which he says grew out of basic user acceptance testing. Now IT has created a user acceptance framework, which is a comprehensive methodology for ensuring business user engagement throughout the development and implementation lifecycle of a system.

“This is as a service like IaaS, but the service we provide to the business is to give them tools and … methods to stay engaged with product development and to also prepare them to write the test cases, execute them and do everything needed for multiple phases of testing as opposed to throwing a ball over a wall,’’ Pick explains.

Similar to what Magellan is doing, he views XaaS as the structuring a particular catalog item in an “as a service” delivery mode, which in TMNA’s case also includes some business-centered services that are independent of any individual project or system.

For example, “IT shops do project management all the time, but we can package project management as a service to help one of our businesses do things that are not all IT-oriented,” like new product development, or to facilitate business process outsourcing, he says. IT is the often the repository for skills and expertise surrounding project management; those skillsets have increasing value outside IT, Pick says.

“IT almost always underpins everything a business does, but when doing BPM [business process management], it’s about organizational change management and understanding business processes and efficiency. So IT is providing BPM services to shepherd one of our businesses going through the optimization or outsourcing of a business process,” Pick says. “In our industry a business process might involve claims handling or billing, or intake of a new application for coverage.”

Providing packaged BPM services to their four Tokio Marine group companies requires a substantial amount of effort, technology, training and non-tech process knowledge around change management, as well as robotic process automation (RPA), he says.

“Predominantly, this is done on demand when a group company says, ‘We have a need,’” Pick adds. IT began offering BPM as a service about three years ago after TMNA’s architecture team “recognized we had skills internally, we just hadn’t been harnessing them,” he says. The RPA component was added last year.

Now their group companies don’t have to reinvent the wheel or go externally to gain expertise and BPM insights. XaaS is a trend, Pick says, but “in the shared services game, this is what we have always done and now there’s a new name for it.”

Mirroring services from mobile app to smart mirror

At Oral Roberts University, IT is taking XaaS to the nth degree, moving from a mobile app offering a concierge-like set of services for students and faculty, to introducing a 52 inch-by-22-inch smart mirror to deliver all IT and university services from all areas of the campus.

The concept is called “Smart Mirror Reality” and users will soon be able to speak or press different commands to receive self-service on everything from fitness and wellbeing to academic and career achievement services, says Mike Mathews, vice president of technology and innovation. Students can request IT-oriented services as well as access the university’s learning management system, their financial aid package, degree plan — even their Fitbit.

The mirror uses the Raspberry Pi computer, which interfaces with Amazon Alexa.

“Instead of having vendors provide cloud services and charging $25,000 to turn on an API library to interface with other things … we said to ourselves, ‘We own the strategy behind integrating everything on campus, so let’s build our own ecosystem,’’’ Mathews explains. IT developed its own set of APIs it calls its “Geovision Ecosystem.”

It behooves IT to make services available in a seamless manner in a variety of different form factors, including a wearable device, he adds. Four years ago, IT received approximately 1,000 calls a month to the help desk and that has been cut by 75 percent by integrating all services together.

“In essence, [we] are making a subset of the ‘smart campus’ and providing ‘everything-as-a-service’ from our own ecosystem,’’ he says. “We have given students intelligence to drive and navigate their journey through education. We have integrated all the services and data … in a very practical, everyday manner.”

At least one early tester likes the idea of a smart mirror. “IT has reinvented what it means to give concierge service around the clock for everything students and faculty need,” says James Russell, a business professor at ORU. “IT has reimagined the service of campus technology.”

With the smart mirror set to launch in the fall, Mathews has redeployed half of his staff “into innovative, rather than traditional, IT operations.” That means the ability to work on cutting-edge technologies like virtual reality and AI, “instead of us having to run around fixing broken parts.” Smart Mirror Reality also has monitoring capabilities and will notify IT any time a system is close to failing, he says.

This has changed the perception of IT from a cost center to innovative partner, Mathews says, noting that five years ago his title was CIO. Now, with his title change to vice president of innovation and technology, “the proof’s in the pudding. People think of IT not as ‘information’ but ‘innovation’” providers.

Making the shift to services

Organizations thinking about moving to XaaS, should start by evaluating the cost, Mathews says. “Some people may not have it in their budget or have the skillsets,’’ he says. “If I didn’t have two key employees I wouldn’t have been able to do it.” He says there has been no cost to ORU to deploy the smart mirror because he is “working on corporate partnerships.”

Additionally, don’t look to your vendors for help, he says, since their focus is on selling their product. “You’ll have to design [an] ecosystem that makes sense for you, and you can determine how much of everything is truly everything.”

It’s also a good idea to figure out if services can be ported. “If a new form factor comes out like this mirror, or eventually, smart glasses, can you put everything into that? If you can’t you have to figure out what pieces are critical” to your users, Mathews says.

At this stage, observers say, just about all companies are doing something with as-a-service and will eventually move to XaaS. “It’s just not that scary a thing,’’ says Westerman. “The question you should be asking is, If you’re not doing it, why?”

14 reasons why software projects fail

From outsized expectations to fundamental feature changes, software development projects get derailed — or declared failures — thanks to a variety of project management and technical factors.

Every software project begins with big dreams and grand visions. Somewhere in an alternative universe, there is a project that fulfills every dream but all too often software projects in our universe stumble toward the finish line and sometimes cross it.

Analysts might like to toss out random numbers to estimate what percentage of software projects fail, but these are wildly inaccurate by definition because, well, failure is not a binary thing. You can end up with code that runs well but no one uses. Or you can end up with code that won’t even compile. Sometimes you can salvage something useful from the flaming wreckage and sometimes it’s best to run away before it explodes.

When the smoldering mess cools, the autopsies begin and people begin to look for an explanation of what went wrong. Here is a list of the most common reasons software projects fail.

Too few team members

The effects of trying to do too much with too few programmers is pretty easy to understand. There are only 52 weeks in a year and people can only grind out so much code before they burn out. I once worked on a team where the manager thought the right way to squeeze more work from agile teams is to schedule each “sprint” so it began immediately after the previous one. No relaxing. No thoughtful pauses to figure out what was working and what was failing. Sprint 42 ended Wednesday at 1:59pm and Sprint 43 began on Wednesday at 2:00pm. They even scheduled retrospective analysis meetings after the next sprint had already started. Some clever guy tried to suggest that they be renamed “marathons” and soon found another job.

Of course, it’s very tricky to guess just how many programmers is enough. Sometimes the plan is complete and the estimates are accurate. Sometimes roadblocks and problems get in the way. It may not be the manager’s fault that the job doubles in size but if you don’t have enough people on the job, your project is likely doomed.

Too many team members

If too few programmers can be bad, too many could potentially be worse. The very same network effects that makes some social media platforms so essential can also doom a software project. More people mean more coordination and that means more meetings, taking time away from writing code. You can try to cancel meetings to give programmers more time to create, but if you don’t hold enough meetings, you’ll soon discover that Team A’s API doesn’t interface Team B’s microservices.

Too many programmers can sap each other’s time, sending the project into a swamp from which it never escapes. It would be nice if we could just throw money at a problem by overstaffing a project, but you can’t.

Fundamental feature changes

In theory, developers like to consider themselves agile. That’s why they embrace the word. But sometimes agility can throw everyone off balance. It all depends whether the shift requires fundamental changes to the underlying framework. It’s easy to be agile when moving a button around or changing a color. But when it involves reworking the database schema or mucking around with sharding and replication, there’s no easy way to gracefully pivot.

Picking the wrong technology for the job

Even if you plan carefully and draw up the correct list of features for the project, things may fail if you use the wrong technology to build out the feature set. Databases, for instance, are designed to be as general and flexible as possible, but they have architectural limitations. If you try to push them to deliver something they’re not designed to do, you could watch them slow to a virtual halt when they scale. Or you may start off with a NoSQL database because they sound so cool only to discover later that you really need ACID-grade transactions to keep things consistent and the database doesn’t offer them. Oops.

Poor prioritization

Good planners draw up a list of features and prioritize them. But sometimes the priorities don’t line up with the reality of implementing them. In the worst cases, the most important features are also the hardest to create.

What are your developers to do? If they concentrate on the most important feature, they will make no progress and may end up delivering none of the functionality. But if they start knocking off the easy ones, well, they may end up with something that’s worthless.

Good planning requires more than a checklist. The architectural vision must take into account the needs and the cost of delivering them.

The market window closes

Sometimes it’s not the programmer’s fault. One of my projects was to turn a best-selling reference book into an app. The book sold like hotcakes in the years before the internet. The plan was to tap into that demand and make an interactive version that would let people sort and search through the data. The programming team delivered software that included everything in the book but was faster, prettier and much lighter than the book itself. But no one wanted it. We could barely give it away. It wasn’t the developers’ fault. The market just didn’t need or want the data any more. There were enough other sources and no one needed another app that would do much the same thing as news sites do everywhere.

Software projects can crater through no fault of the programming or management team. Sometimes an idea seems great, but the marketplace has moved on.

Bad architectural decisions

On one project, I was given the job of changing one number in one row in the database. When the user finished registering, I was to add the user’s id number to the latest order. It sounds simple, right? But the system was built on a microservices architecture and I couldn’t solve this by writing one line of code that would tell the database to UPDATE that column. Nope. The architectural plan was to add a new microservice call to the existing stack and even this was hard because my first microservice call needed to trigger another microservice call and so on.

In the end, the architectural whiz who created this network of microservices told me that it was all very simple and then he outlined a serpentine path through five different layers of the microservices architecture. So my job was to add five new API calls to five different microservices apps. Each of these was fully independent, so that meant adding five sets of automated tests for each layer. Each microservice API was developed by a different team over the years, requiring me to understand and emulate five different styles of coding. All to change one number.

The team was constantly being slowed down by simple requests like this. When I left, the five new API calls had been written and they had just been successfully tested together. But I never got to see them deployed.

Architectural decisions can last a lifetime — especially if your ego is thoroughly invested in them and you can’t change them. Project managers have to be ready to notice when the main architectural plan is not working so big decisions can be made. If leadership can’t notice when their plans go awry, the coders in the trenches will keep toiling away trying to make headway against an impossible headwind caused by a bad architectural model.

Political conflicts

Blaming political factors for a technical failure may seem like a weaselly move, a dodge instead of a full-throated mea culpa, but it’s increasingly true. As projects grow bigger and span multiple organizations and layers, it shouldn’t be a surprise that factions appear and groups jockey for control, resources and ultimately power.

Political factions are different from real technical differences. There are often technical standards or code bases that do much the same thing in different ways. Take XML and JSON. Now that I’ve typed that, I can feel the fans of either rushing to explain why they aren’t the same and their favorite choice is the right one. They may be right, but when one part of a team loves one choice and another part holds the competing faction in the highest regard, well, friction is going to tear them apart.

This has grown even more common as architects split up applications into multiple, smaller services and APIs. Different groups will end up controlling these and they won’t always get along. If Group A likes JSON and Group B clings to XML, well, your team will either need to implement both or get one of them to change. All three are a pain for any team that must work with both Group A and Group B.

Betting on technology that’s not ready for production

Programmers love the latest new tools and frameworks. They want to believe that the new approach will sweep away all the cruft that bogs down the previous generation. They’re sure that the new abstractions and routines will unify, extend and simplify whatever it is that the code is supposed to do.

But often, the next generation is not ready for production use. The new features may be shiny and seem perfect, but there are often gaps that aren’t immediately obvious. Sometimes the code supports only a few file types or it interfaces with only a few databases. The others are coming real soon, they assure you, but your project needs to ship this month and “real soon” could mean six or more months before the features you need are complete.

Issues like this can doom software projects. The team bets on a new technology because it seems to solve many major problems and it often does. But somewhere along the line, usually in the final home stretch, the programmers discover that some part of the new technology is missing. Sometimes it’s not even documented. The developers of that code were going to get to it but, well, you know.

Betting on technology that’s soon to be outdated

It’s tempting to think like Goldilocks and blame technology that’s too old just as much as technology that’s too young. In my experience, the old stuff is usually more reliable and battle-tested, which is more valuable than a full feature set. But that doesn’t mean old technology is perfect. Features can be missing that are vital to your software project once it goes live. Worse, betting on old tech can cause you to miss out on future opportunities based on changes down the line. New ideas, protocols and file formats appear, and they can go unimplemented. And if someone from a competing team insists that you support some new protocol then the old tech will hurt.

Unrealistic deadlines

Figure out how long it will take and then double it, the experts say. As if the proverbial experts have ever truly finished a project in their lives. They’re always offering opinions instead of writing code.

Deadlines are tricky. Many projects need to make it to market by a particular season or event. Yet when deadlines are first written down, your developers haven’t begun to discover the roadblocks and hurdles in their way. Then if the project slips and the event passes by without the software being launched, the entire project is seen as a failure even if the code is just about to run smoothly. Deadlines help everyone focus and pull together, but they also create expectations that can be unrealistic.

Unforeseen competition

A good product manager surveys the competition before diving in but no one can predict what competition may appear out of nowhere. If new competitors introduce new features that you must duplicate, well, see the sections on feature changes and priority mismatches, above.

Rushing the process

Many software projects start as the vision of a person or team who wants to fix something. They come up with a phrase like “Snapchat for Y” or “Uber for Y” and then expect the product team to be as responsive as Snapchat or Uber. The problem is that figuring out the scope of the project, sketching the data flows and imagining the UI are often ten times as much work as writing the code. But the imagineers want to go from idea to code right away. (Why? You might blame developers who demo a new framework, database or serverless thingy with the promise that you can write a finished app in a few lines of code.)

The wireframes, database schema and user stories aren’t just hand waving, but an essential part of the job. But most people want to believe that a software project is just writing code to implement an idea.

False belief in the power of software

Sometimes the dreamers have unrealistic beliefs in the power of software to change the world. Many people imagined that social media would unite us all but somehow it’s just exposed fault lines that were always obvious. Many software projects begin with a blue-sky slide deck that promises to disrupt something and revolutionize some corner of the world. When shoving some bits in a database doesn’t save or transform anyone, well, people get angry, bored, confused or worse. Then they say the software is broken and move on. It doesn’t matter if the database is running smoothly and the app stores the bits in the right places. The software fails to deliver the magical transformation that everyone expected.

Many software projects can compile, pass QA, ship and even get decent reviews but ultimately fail to achieve any of the promises on the blue-sky slide deck because, well, those change-the-world promises are impossible.

Amex GBT CTO speaks about big data and business travel industry challenges

David Thompson explains why big data and data science are major components of GBT’s overarching technology strategy

Although there is no industry that hasn’t already been disrupted by the dizzying pace in which technology is evolving, it can be claimed that travel is one of the trades particularly affected by it.

In Singapore alone, 680 tour agencies ceased business during the period 2013-2018 and the remaining ones are struggling to keep afloat against the competition of online booking websites and apps.

The dynamism of technology makes difficult to predict what the future trends will look like and who will be the next game changer.

David Thompson, Global Chief Information and Technology Officer at American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT), talks in this interview with CIO ASEAN about the current challenges facing the business travel industry and why big data has become an integral part to the business and value-add services.

What are the challenges facing the business travel industry?

Thompson says that one of the main challenges for the business travel industry today is keeping up with customer demands of business travel technology. This stems from users increasingly expecting consumer travel tech capabilities and multi-channel options to book travel, which hasn’t historically been available in business travel.

“A growing desire for personalisation has sparked a need for predictive, intelligent products which requires travel management companies to manage supplier partnerships in order to integrate effectively,” he tells CIO ASEAN.

“The biggest hurdle for us is getting travel managers to embrace these technologies and become enablers and supporters of these programs. A seamless merger of technology and corporate processes allows us to create a truly frictionless experience.”

Data security and compliance is by no means and exclusive challenge of the travel industry, but the nature of the business, which requires storing high amounts of sensitive information, makes it necessary to set high standards.

“The travel industry is well equipped to lead on GDPR as travel management companies (TMCs) typically have a long history of managing sensitive data,” says Thompson. “TMCs must ensure these standards are a significant component of their product design and data architecture to lead successfully.”

But which challenges is the industry facing in Southeast Asia in particular? With the region being now home to some of the strongest emerging markets, the growing economy and regional trade continues to drive business travel between nations.

“The variety of cultures within the region means there is high value placed on face-to-face meetings, more so than in other regions where teleconferencing would suffice for a lot of business communication,” explains the IT executive.

“Therefore, business travellers spend more time travelling, so their wellbeing is a focus for GBT in APAC. In a turbulent world with plenty of travel disruptions, be they man-made or environmental crises, there are many scenarios in which companies need to ensure they’re assisting their staff in times of distress. We assist them in meeting these demands through our traveller care technology, and helping businesses meet their duty of care expectations is particularly valued within APAC.”

Using big data to achieve best results

For Thompson, delivering results for clients is a twofold practice at Amex GBT. On one hand, he aims to provide the most positive experience possible for the corporate traveler. On the other, he also wants to provide companies with the data, insights, and expertise, to manage their travel program as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.

“For the business traveller, we utilise technology to help them safely and efficiently reach their destination, so they can be productive once they land,” he says. “With ongoing weather and security issues within Asia-Pacific (APAC), we’re seeing an increased emphasis on duty of care solutions which help companies track and communicate with travellers.”

According to the CTO, Amex GBT has one of the most robust and secure data sets in business travel with traveller information captured across all travel booking channels globally.

“Recent GBT research has shown that close to one in five travellers in APAC have had to reschedule business travel due to safety concerns. Technology initiatives such as GBTs Expert Care enable travellers to be tracked and contacted during such travel disruption, ensuring travelling staff feel valued and looked after.”

Big data and data science are major components of GBT’s overarching technology strategy and have become integral to our business and value-add services.

GBT’s big data and analytics platform, a repository that houses more than six years of data, drives the company’s reporting and analytics tools. Thompson reveals that GBT will be launching a new benchmarking service, Peer Travel Insights (PTI), that uses advanced analytic capabilities to measure travel program performance and competitiveness. It helps travel managers understand if they are doing a good job as well as measuring traveller well-being metrics.

“We employ our big data and analytics platform to respond to business questions and customer requests for information in a significantly more efficient manner than the past where answers would be created by collecting multiple data elements from various databases of queries against GBT,” explains Thompson.

“The big data and analytics platform compiles this information in one area and has become a powerful tool for improving our response time for business and financial questions. It also helps provide insights to businesses on their travel spend, and how to consolidate and increase efficiency.”

How AI is revolutionizing financial services

From customer service to risk management, artificial intelligence is ushering in the next financial revolution — as long as compliance issues can be addressed.

Every year, human resources consulting firm Mercer collects more than 30,000 compensation and benefit surveys to help its clients better serve their employees. For years, the process of preparing and cleansing the data required weeks of administrative oversight and back-and-forth communication with clients.

In 2017, Mercer started an initiative to bring those back-office operations under control and provide a better experience to its customers. The Mercer Data Connector, completed last year, reduces the time for survey processing from months to minutes, say Darren Duquette, principal of global business solutions at Mercer, and Rick Koo, Mercer’s digital technology solutions leader.

"As we continue on this digital transformation journey, it is important that we continue to view ourselves through the eyes of our clients and deliver user-centric solutions that make it simple and rewarding to do business with Mercer," says Koo.

The project has earned Mercer a 2019  Digital Edge 50 Award  for  digital innovation.

Overhauling the data pipeline

Duquette and Koo say leaders in the company’s Career Products line identified the opportunity to optimize an already successful business and expand into new markets. In response, representatives from the business, technology and operations came together to brainstorm about the possibilities.

The team found numerous sources of friction in Mercer’s existing data collection process: It was high touch, requiring a lot of back-and-forth between Mercer and its clients to clean the data. There was a high error rate because clients needed to manually enter HRIS data in Excel spreadsheets supplied by Mercer. There was a lot of operational overhead involved in preparing templates for different products and to cleanse the data after clients submitted their files. Normalizing job titles across industry, region, country, client, and jobs to standard benchmarks based on Mercer’s library of 16,000 job titles was a complex task. Moreover, the process simply didn’t meet current business needs, let alone future business needs.

Mercer

Rick Koo, digital technology solutions leader, Mercer

What was needed was a total transformation of the company’s process for ingesting, cleansing, and mapping client data. The project, which also aimed to increase Mercer’s speed-to-market with new products, would need to significantly reduce operational overhead and deliver a superb digital customer experience. The team decided that, to make it easier for clients to do business with Mercer, the resulting platform would need to enable client self-service, provide an intuitive workflow, integrate analytics, and be extensible to meet future business needs.

The outcome of that effort was the Mercer Data Connector, a data collection platform that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to optimize back-office processes and improve efficiency. It’s built on Apigee’s API gateway to provide microservices between application tiers and domains; LTI Mosaic, a big data platform that provides JIT data ingestion; and numerous open source projects, including Node.JS, Angular, Docker, MongoDB, Jenkins, and Cucumber.

Singapore-based blockchain accelerator partners with BMW, Intel and Nielsen

The three companies have teamed up with Tribe Accelerator to lend their expertise, knowledge, and best practices to blockchain startups throughout Singapore

Cybrain / Getty Images

Tribe Accelerator, the first Singaporean government supported blockchain accelerator, has announced a trio of new partnerships with BMW Group Asia, Intel Corporation, and Nielsen.

Launched last year as the blockchain and enterprise arm of venture capital firm TRIVE Ventures, Tribe Accelerator was founded with the aim of leveraging the knowledge and experience of established blockchain companies to help startups in the city-state.

It is supported by Enterprise Singapore, the government agency responsible for developing the country’s startup ecosystem as well as PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Singaporean hub and the South Korean blockchain network Icon Foundation.

[ Beware the 9 warning signs of bad IT architecture and see why these 10 old-school IT principles still rule. | Sign up for CIO newsletters. ]

Tribe Accelerator announced the news of the three new partnerships on Friday, stating that the firms will be able to share their knowledge and industry expertise with Tribe’s startups to help the country build an “inclusive” ecosystem that is “ready for industry 4.0.” Each of the three companies have their own unique set of skills that will enable Tribe to drive future growth.

BMW Group Asia are set to teach a masterclass on technology in the automotive industry, best practices in innovation and how to implement blockchain solutions on a mass-market scale.

Dr. Carsten Sapia, Vice President of group IT and head of the Asia Pacific region, BMW Group Asia told reporters, “BMW understands the great potential blockchain technology has for the automotive and mobility industry” and that the company planned to continue “actively collaborating with various organisations globally on further developing this technology in order to transform research into scalable value propositions.”

According to Intel’s blockchain program director Michael Reed, Intel Corporation will offer business and technical mentorship to startups, demonstrating how the company’s existing technologies can help improve privacy, security, and scalability of blockchain solutions.

Meanwhile, Nielsen will help startups that are currently in the testing stage of their new blockchain projects. It will provide a “sandbox” that will allow Tribe ’s startups to test their technologies in a “safe, controlled environment”.

According to a statement put out by Tribe, Nielsen will also help startups to gain a “first-hand appreciation of inherent business risks, understand regulatory environments in which their prospective clients operate, and fine-tune their business models.”

Although Tribe is still a relatively new accelerator, it has been working hard since its inception to further the blockchain ecosystem in Singapore. Only last month, Tribe announced it was partnering with Ethereum development studio ConsenSys.

This partnership saw ConsenSys providing mentoring to the accelerator program and holding consultation sessions with startups from across Singapore.

Tribe Accelerator will begin accepting applications for its second batch next month
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“Nóng” cuộc đua ngân hàng bán lẻ

15:13 | 29/03/2019

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Những năm gần đây, chiến lược phát triển dịch vụ ngân hàng bán lẻ là một cuộc đua lớn, nhiều đột phá, đầy tính cạnh tranh giữa các ngân hàng trong nước, nước ngoài và ngân hàng liên kết với các công ty fintech…

Tiềm năng lớn

Trong những năm gần đây, nhu cầu về dịch vụ ngân hàng ngày càng cao, nhất là dịch vụ ngân hàng bán lẻ. Tập trung cho hoạt động bán lẻ đang trở thành xu thế, được coi là chiến lược phát triển của nhiều ngân hàng nhằm đa dạng nguồn thu, giảm thiểu rủi ro hoạt động và đạt hiệu quả kinh doanh tối ưu. Ngân hàng bán lẻ hướng đến phục vụ khách hàng cá nhân, hộ gia đình, doanh nghiệp nhỏ và vừa, do đó các dịch vụ thường đơn giản, thuận tiện và có tính thường xuyên như: Sản phẩm tiền gửi, tài khoản, thẻ tín dụng, vay vốn…

Chỉ tính trong giai đoạn 2016-2018, thu nhập từ hoạt động ngân hàng bán lẻ của các ngân hàng đều gia tăng hằng năm với tỉ trọng khá lớn, như ở BIDV lên tới 29%. Việt Nam là thị trường tiềm năng cho hoạt động ngân hàng bán lẻ với dân số trên 96 triệu người, GDP bình quân đầu người năm 2018 đạt gần 2.590USD (tăng 201USD so với năm 2017). Do đó, năm 2019 được dự báo sẽ tiếp tục là năm nở rộ các dịch vụ ngân hàng bán lẻ.

Phòng giao dịch của BIDV

Hơn nữa, hiện nay, một lượng lớn dân cư chưa được tiếp cận các sản phẩm dịch vụ, tiện ích ngân hàng sẽ trở thành nguồn lực cho hoạt động ngân hàng bán lẻ. Đặc biệt, trong thời đại công nghệ thông tin, dịch vụ ngân hàng bán lẻ sẽ được tiếp sức mạnh mẽ khi có hàng triệu khách hàng mới từ nông thôn tới đô thị, đang muốn được tiếp cận một cách nhanh chóng các sản phẩm tài chính, công nghệ mới.

Với những điều kiện thuận lợi đó, các ngân hàng đều quan tâm và tập trung khai thác thị trường bán lẻ và đạt được những kết quả tốt như: Đẩy mạnh hiện đại hóa công nghệ ngân hàng, phát triển dịch vụ mới thông qua Internet banking, home banking, mobile banking… Các hình thức cho vay, huy động vốn cũng mở rộng và đa dạng phù hợp với từng đối tượng khách hàng, tạo điều kiện cải thiện đời sống kinh tế – xã hội.

Cuộc đua chiến lược

Nhập cuộc lĩnh vực bán lẻ đòi hỏi các ngân hàng phải đặt khách hàng làm trung tâm để xây dựng chiến lược riêng biệt, nhằm tối ưu hóa trải nghiệm cá nhân của khách hàng. Quan trọng hơn, ngân hàng cần mang đến cho khách hàng niềm tin, cảm xúc và sự tiện lợi trong từng sản phẩm, dịch vụ.

Cuộc đua giữa các ngân hàng để mang đến dịch vụ tối ưu cho các khách hàng diễn ra sôi động, các ngân hàng có những chiến lược phát triển rất khác nhau nhưng đều tập trung vào các hoạt động: Mở rộng mạng lưới, đa dạng hóa sản phẩm, cải thiện dịch vụ…

Trong hoạt động mở rộng mạng lưới giao dịch, các ngân hàng xác định phục vụ tối đa đối tượng khách hàng mục tiêu cũng như gia tăng độ phủ sóng thương hiệu mà vẫn phải giải đúng bài toán quản lý chi phí và lợi nhuận. Trong hướng đi này, Agribank hướng đến mở rộng đối tượng khách hàng nông thôn, còn LienVietPostBank mở rộng mạng lưới tích hợp với 1.300 phòng giao dịch bưu điện. Riêng BIDV tập trung theo các địa bàn trọng điểm với mạng lưới mở rộng, vươn xa toàn quốc. Đến nay, BIDV đã mở rộng với khoảng hơn 1.000 chi nhánh và phòng giao dịch trên khắp cả nước cùng với hơn 56.000 điểm kết nối ATM/POS.

Đa dạng hóa sản phẩm cũng là một hướng đi quan trọng của các ngân hàng, giúp ngân hàng có thể tìm kiếm và đáp ứng nhu cầu của từng khách hàng. Ngoài hai hoạt động cốt lõi là tiền gửi và tín dụng, các sản phẩm thẻ, chuyển tiền, ngân hàng điện tử, thanh toán hóa đơn, bảo hiểm cũng được các ngân hàng nghiên cứu và đưa ra nhiều chương trình, chính sách khuyến mãi để thu hút khách hàng. Chỉ tính riêng BIDV hiện đang triển khai trên 100 sản phẩm, dịch vụ ngân hàng dành cho khách hàng cá nhân.

Thêm vào đó, phân khúc khách hàng cao cấp cũng là hướng đi mới dành cho các ngân hàng khi có tới hàng triệu người mong muốn được sử dụng dịch vụ cao cấp của ngân hàng. Nhiều ngân hàng có những dịch vụ đặc biệt dành cho khách hàng ưu tiên như: Techcombank Piority, VP Pank Diamond, MB Private… Trong khi đó, BIDV cung cấp gói sản phẩm “Khách hàng ưu tiên BIDV Premier” ấn tượng với nhiều ưu đãi và dịch vụ vượt trội như: Được hưởng những ưu đãi khi giao dịch; hưởng tiện ích đưa đón và phòng chờ hạng sang tại sân bay; tiện ích chăm sóc sức khỏe, chơi golf, ăn uống hay spa…

Cải thiện dịch vụ chăm sóc khách hàng cũng là một trong những vấn đề cốt lõi trong xu thế phát triển của các ngân hàng bán lẻ khi cảm xúc, niềm tin của khách hàng trở thành yếu tố then chốt cho việc lựa chọn sử dụng dịch vụ. Một số ngân hàng như Techcombank, TP Bank… đã nắm bắt xu hướng của khách hàng để xây dựng đội ngũ nhân viên, giao dịch viên trẻ, năng động và thân thiện.

Các ngân hàng quy mô lớn và lâu đời cũng không ngoại lệ khi luôn luôn nỗ lực cải thiện chất lượng chăm sóc khách hàng của mình. BIDV, một trong những ngân hàng lâu đời nhất Việt Nam với 62 năm phát triển, đã trở thành ngân hàng tiên phong thành lập Trung tâm mạng xã hội (SMCC) giúp lắng nghe, giám sát tất cả thông tin, thảo luận và đặc biệt là những ý kiến của khách hàng trên mạng xã hội liên quan đến BIDV, từ đó có thể tìm ra những khúc mắc của khách hàng không chỉ về sản phẩm dịch vụ mà còn về đội ngũ nhân viên tư vấn, giúp cải thiện chất lượng dịch vụ và chăm sóc khách hàng ngày càng hiệu quả hơn.

Cuối cùng là xu thế số hóa trong hoạt động ngân hàng bán lẻ. Đây là một xu thế bắt buộc đối với tất cả các ngân hàng bởi cuộc cách mạng công nghiệp (CMVN) 4.0 ảnh hưởng đến mọi mặt trong cuộc sống, khiến việc khách hàng sử dụng công nghệ trong giao dịch với ngân hàng trở nên quan trọng. Biểu hiện rõ nhất thể hiện ở số liệu giá trị thanh toán qua điện thoại di động năm 2018 đã tăng 126% và qua Internet là 18% (theo VnEconomy). Thêm nữa, do áp lực từ tiêu chuẩn Basel II, các ngân hàng đang chạy đua trong việc đầu tư vào công nghệ, số hóa để giảm thiểu chi phí và buộc phải giảm dần phụ thuộc vào tín dụng.

Để đón đầu xu thế này, các ngân hàng đã đầu tư mạnh mẽ, hoàn thiện ứng dụng mobile banking. Đơn cử, BIDV đã triển khai ứng dụng BIDV SmartBanking với các tính năng quen thuộc như chuyển tiền, thanh toán hóa đơn, nạp tiền điện thoại. Ứng dụng này còn được tích hợp chức năng đặt phòng, đặt vé máy bay hay vé xem phim. Trong năm 2018, số lượng khách hàng sử dụng BIDV SmartBanking đạt 1,8 triệu lượt. Thêm vào đó, việc kết hợp với các công ty Fintech hay tích hợp chức năng QRPay cũng đang là một hướng đi mới của các ngân hàng.

Mỗi ngân hàng đều có chiến lược phát triển riêng và dẫn đầu trên một lĩnh vực nào đó. BIDV, VietinBank, Vietcombank vẫn luôn được nhắc đến như những ngân hàng hàng đầu trong hệ thống ngân hàng Việt Nam, có sức ảnh hưởng lớn tới thị trường. Đối với lĩnh vực bán lẻ, các ngân hàng đều đang có những hướng đi, chiến lược phát triển đột phá và nỗ lực trở thành ngân hàng bán lẻ số 1 tại Việt Nam. Rất khó để khẳng định ngân hàng nào dẫn đầu trong lĩnh vực bán lẻ.

Trong cuộc đua này, một số, tổ chức uy tín trong và ngoài nước về lĩnh vực tài chính cũng đưa ra nhiều tiêu chí khắt khe để đánh giá xếp hạng các ngân hàng như Hiệp hội Ngân hàng Việt Nam (VNBA), Tổ chức Dữ liệu quốc tế (IDG) bình xét cho giải thưởng “Ngân hàng bán lẻ tiêu biểu nhất”; Tạp chí The Asian Banker bình xét cho giải thưởng “Ngân hàng bán lẻ tốt nhất Việt Nam” trong nhiều năm vừa qua.

Cuộc đua ngân hàng bán lẻ đang nóng hơn bao giờ hết, đặc biệt trong thời đại số bùng nổ như hiện nay.

Việt Nam là thị trường tiềm năng cho hoạt động ngân hàng bán lẻ với dân số trên 96 triệu người, GDP bình quân đầu người năm 2018 đạt gần 2.590USD (tăng 201USD so với năm 2017). Do đó, năm 2019 được dự báo sẽ tiếp tục là năm nở rộ các dịch vụ ngân hàng bán lẻ.

Finastra launches tablet-based platform to bring community banking services outside the branch

Finastra has launched Fusion Digital Front Office, an innovative tablet-based banking platform that enables community banks and credit unions to take services directly to the consumer, outside of the branch. The solution provides a simple gateway to manage account origination, sales and service, and transaction processing from any remote location.

Taking business to the accountholder is a new and modern way of banking. Fusion Digital Front Office enables business development employees to go mobile and service account holders where they are, at any time of the day. It is highly configurable, easy to use and intuitive, so employees require minimal training. It also offers a single, digital platform to drive a consistent user experience across channels for both employees and account holders, resulting in more personalized and robust opportunities for revenue generation.

Partners 1st Federal Credit Union and Vons Federal Credit Union are the first clients to pilot Fusion Digital Front Office ahead of general availability.

Fusion Digital Front Office, deployed in the cloud on Microsoft Azure, is device-agnostic, scalable, responsive, and built on a modern platform. It also integrates with other third-party solutions and Finastra solutions (Fusion Analytics, Fusion Mortgagebot, Fusion DecisionPro, Fusion uOpen, and more). The ability to integrate easily with other solutions ensures that data flows smoothly in and out of the application. Users gain real-time transaction productivity via a single-sign on.

Emirates NBD to use sandbox as fintech certification platform

Emirates NBD is bidding to attract third party fintech firms to its API Sandbox environment by promising to arrange demo opportunities with senior leaders of the bank and a certification award to participating startups.

The sandbox, developed in concert with Virtusa, consists of over 200 APIs and 500 end points covering retail, corporate and SMEs. Developers also have access to over three million simulated customer transactions based on the BIAN (Banking Industry Architecture Network) model.

Launched in 2018, Emirates NBD is now attempting to woo more third parties to the development programme by partnering with the Dubai International Financial Centre’s Fintech Hive accelerator to open a new programme which will certify fintech firms that have passed through the testing phase.

“All registered fintechs in the Dubai International Financial Centre that build effective, working prototypes or demos using the APIs will have the opportunity to present to senior leaders from the bank for a chance to collaborate,” says Abdulla Qassem, group chief operating officer, Emirates NBD . "Furthermore, registered fintechs who use the API sandbox and demo their prototypes working on the sandbox, will also receive a signed certificate from Emirates NBD and DIFC FinTech Hive acknowledging their participation and certifying their capabilities."