The Board have released the business objectives for the short to mid term ― and it's plain that the IT cannot cope with the demands we're about to put through it. It's creaking badly enough as things are!
Any financial services enterprise with more than five years trading history will be able to point to significant IT infrastructure problems – most of them relating to an unnecessary surplus of disparate data, code, systems, processes or kit. As strategists have added products to the original portfolio, or undertaken mergers and acquisitions, silo systems have proliferated and the quick fix has been to mirror and replicate processes and data across the infrastructure. If technologists were to design an infrastructure to fit today's model – sure as eggs are eggs it would bear very little resemblance to what actually exists.
There's a chronic lack of architecture – systems have not been designed – they've just grown. And the business process re-engineering you invested in just a few years ago failed to predict the model required today – far less that needed for tomorrow.
There are those who will urge the business to apply a CRM layer over the whole infrastructure. It might even work in the short term, but it costs a tidy sum and fails to address those questionable root processes and the underlying lack of integrity of the infrastructure. But this is where most businesses are. Applying patches, work-arounds and wishing away the real problem.
Precious few businesses can afford to rip it out and start again. The best the technologist can hope for is progressive refurbishment against a logical plan that addresses the entire architecture over, let's say, ten years. Right?
And what about the cultural impact of change? The ‘we've always done it this way’ attitudes of your users?
The IT must be brought to heel… there really is no alternative. Currently, systems already dictate too much what the organisation can or cannot do. The business is constrained by decisions it made five, ten, fifteen years ago and any effort to break free merely exacerbated the complexity of the architecture.
If only there was a way of making a clean break from the past without actually ripping the whole thing out. And, of course, there is. eXii is systems IT designed specifically for the financial services industry. It is the flexible, scalable, robust and high performance architecture you would design ‘in a perfect world’. You can adopt it at your own pace, gradually integrating systems, processes and data or you can go hell for leather and replace your entire urban sprawl of an IT architecture with a shiny new eXii. Either way, it will deliver you the perfect ROI combination (more than you expected, quicker than you thought possible).
The beauty of eXii is its ‘straight-through processing’ – a principle which ensures data integrity by preserving just one set of data and allowing input at the user interface to directly act on that data. It is a leaner, quicker, fitter model for managing systems, processes and data, one which is configurable and reconfigurable as business strategists require.
Processes are componentised, making development and programming much simpler. This allows new products to be designed, defined, developed, tested and launched in days (not weeks or even months) – an eXii characteristic that will have sales & marketing salivating.
One major benefit of componentising the process code is that products which look similar to the wider world but which rely on different pieces of developed code can be compiled together in eXii into one, rationalised system. This reduces your maintenance costs, increases efficiency and reduces the scope for error. It also means that for the purposes of planning your phased adoption of eXii you can view your systems in compatible sets rather than as individual pieces.
At a stroke, the direction of travel has been reversed from complexity to simplicity. eXii brings you to a position of power over the technology, allowing you to bend it to your will rather than being hamstrung by its lack of power. Quicker than you think, you can be enjoying a more efficient, less expensive and more responsive eXii driven business.