Technological Thoughts by Jerome Kehrli

A few weeks ago, I did a speech about the Digitalization and its impact on financial institutions, both in terms of challenges and opportunities in the context of my role as Head of R&D in my current company.
I am reporting here my speech as an article.

Even though the Digitalization and its impacts is something so widely discussed and studied nowadays, even in banking institutions, I still find it puzzling that so many of them struggle following the pace.
Having said that, many others on the other hand have well understood how much technology is about to disrupt the banking business just as Uber has disrupted the transportation business and AirBnB the lodging business and many good and enlightening initiatives start to flourish in the news.

But still, it seems to me that most innovations in banking are really coming from small players or even startups - think of fintechs - instead of coming from the big players of the banking industry. For instance, paying everything with a cellphone is a thing for a few years now in many African countries while it's not at all in Europe, even in Switzerland, THE country of banking.
Especially in Switzerland, financial institutions struggle keeping up with evolution of their business coming from the digitalization on one side and the regulatory pressure as well as the reduction of the margins on the other side.
Discussing this very matter further exceeds the scope of this article of course but I want to report below my speech notes and present what I see as the most important challenges and opportunities for the banking industry coming from the digitalization.

I've seen this infographic from Christopher Webb at Deloitte (at the time) recently.
This is the most brilliant infographic I've seen for years.

Christopher Webb presents here a pretty extended set of Agile Practices associated to their respective frameworks. The practices presented are a collection of all Agile practices down the line, related to engineering but also management, product identification, design, operation, etc.

[Click to enlarge]
(Source : Christopher Webb - LAST Conference 2016 Agile Landscape - https://www.slideshare.net/ChrisWebb6/last-conference-2016-agile-landscape-presentation-v1)

I find this infographic brilliant since its the first time I see a "one ring to rule them all" view of what I consider should be the practices towards scaling Agility at the level of the whole IT Organization.

Very often, when we think of Agility, we limit our consideration to solely the Software Build Process.
But Agility is more than that. And I believe an Agile corporation should embrace also Agile Design, Agile Operations and Agile Management.
This infographic does a great job in presenting how these frameworks enrich and complements each others towards scaling Agility at the level of the whole IT Organization.

To be honest there are even many more frameworks that those indicated on this infographic and Chris Webb is presenting some additional - reaching 43 in total - in his presentation.
But I believe he did a great job in presenting the most essential ones and presenting how these practices, principles and framework work together to achieve the ultimate goal of every corporation: skyrocketing employee productivity and happiness, maximizing customer satisfaction and blowing operational efficiency up.

Now I would want to present why I think considering Agility down the line in each and every aspect around the engineering team and how these frameworks completing each other are important.