You have to be listening to the customer to understand what their challenges are, and how they view the service being provided.
How do organisations go faster when it comes to digital acceleration?
Many organisations embark on transformation programmes without taking on board the customer experience. You have to be listening to the customer to understand what their challenges are, and how they view the service being provided.
Having people in the wrong place, culturally, slows down transformation. For example, someone might be the architect of the old way of doing something and if new ways are counter to what they implemented, they need to overcome that emotional tie. In general, people and culture are the biggest problems when we look at the speed of transformation.
Third, most organisations we deal with in the financial services sector have multiple technology platforms and packages, or internally developed systems. With digital transformation, you’re trying to provide end-to-end capability and the data gets in the way of that transformation. Many organisations put a nice front-end on the systems, but it hasn’t solved the problem of embedded data, and it hasn’t streamlined that business process.
One of the important steps is knowing where people are in terms of their capacity to change. We work with clients to use surveys that will score internal teams on certain capabilities, or assess how they see the organisation.
How should organisations gain the insights they need to drive transformation?
Many people think that transformation is a technology project but the key driver of digital transformation is not technology. You need to address the business needs and challenges, not just focus on using smart tools and the latest technology. Bear in mind that technology is the enabler, not the solution.
It is essential that you can define the KPIs and the roadmap needed to address the business need. Whether you’re driving more revenue, growing the customer base, or improving customer experience scores, the goal needs to be understood in order to prioritise the right things.
The roadmap should be defined across people, process and technology. Sometimes we use the McKinsey methodology (the seven S’s). If you don’t have the right skills, the right culture and capability, change will not happen, much less at pace.
One of the important steps is knowing where people are in terms of their capacity to change. We work with clients to use surveys that will score internal teams on certain capabilities, or assess how they see the organisation. In many cases, this data actually already exists through HR surveys that capture insights about how people see leadership and change. This data needs to be put into the context of digital transformation.
We can also provide a framework of stakeholders that does a similar thing, if it doesn’t already exist. It measures 25-30 elements of change characteristics, and that can be compared to benchmarks for your industry. This provides a good platform for conversations to happen, and to identify any weak spots. If you don’t have the right mindset in the organisation, then change won’t happen, regardless of anything else you do.
If you’re really serious about agile then there’s a layer of middle management that often needs to be moved out of the way, because you need the right people with the right mindset.
MARTIN HARVEY
CEO
TORI Global
How do you help clients’ organisations to become more agile and more resilient?
Resilience has been a hot topic in the financial services sector since the publication of the Operational Resilience paper by the Bank of England and the PRI. Every financial services organisation that trades through the UK has to demonstrate they have a resilience plan to fix any problems, following historical events like the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other challenges.
There's a real push from the Bank of England on driving operational resilience. We’ve pulled together a maturity assessment programme to assess the status of where organisations are across 10 pillars of resilience. It looks at the risks around key business processes, assessing tolerance levels, what vendors underpin those processes and whether they are set up in the right way.
We look at cyber security risks, which are huge, especially with people working from home. You’ve got people carrying computers between the office and home, or printing things out to give to other people.
When it comes to becoming more agile, we see organisations running agile programmes that aren’t agile. Perhaps they don’t have people who are scrum masters in agile transformation. They haven’t embedded it as part of the culture. If it’s not driven from the top, then it’s never going to be embedded. When people think a project is over-running, we often see them revert back to waterfall, or mixing agile and waterfall.
Truly embedding agility is an 18–24-month process that starts with realising there’s an investment to be made, and it won’t be fast, or free. If you’re really serious about agile then there’s a layer of middle management that often needs to be moved out of the way, because you need the right people with the right mindset.
Tori Global is a financial services consultancy that has provided advice to financial organisations around the world for 20 years. The company works with energy and pragmatism to find solutions to clients’ problems based on values of Trust, Openness, Respect and Integrity.