19NOVEMBER 2022By Fahad Najeeb, Head of Data Platforms and Engineering, Latitude Financial ServicesDIGITAL TRANSFORMATION/MODERNISATION, IT IS A CONTINUOUS JOURNEY Digital Transformation is an exercise undertaken to uplift an organisation's processes and Modernisation is about upgrading the systems & technology to meet current demand and requirements. (I will use the term Modernisation to address both in my article). Most organisations today take an approach of modernising their processes and systems as a once off exercise i.e., Transition from State A to State B. Question is if this always work and is the best approach? Or perhaps should we ask does State A always need to be non-existent for State B to exist? Modernisation focus can easily be at decommissioning of current state which depending on the complexity of the processes and systems is usually expensive, extensive and time consuming. How about if the focus is increased on co-existence (or transitive but for longer term) for current State and future State while achieving the modernisation targets. There are many factors that make modernisation complex: 1. Time and Cost of discovery to analyse current state being high. 2. Commercial licenses of current state locked in for years. 3. Dependencies of security, infra, network between old state and new state. 4. Value proposition usually after complete transformation. One approach is to go through each step one by one while another approach is not to disrupt the current state and stand-up a parallel state. This parallel state may exist in digital platforms, digital channels, Data ecosystem, middleware, and applications.How would one pay for a parallel state, immediate question comes to mind? New state needs to be built on a high value use case or a critical go to market initiative that will help adoption and drive usage across the organisation. Think about an acquisition your organisation might have done, this could be the best time to leverage this approach and build modern systems. Adoption, usage and modern systems gravity takes on eventually and helps for complete transition from base line to target. Coexisting states bring disparity as well, you will need to have processes and patterns that are forward and backward compatible. For e.g., an organisation might stand-up a modern data platform alongside its legacy warehouse, modern ecosystem will drive adoption of multiple high value use cases and increase adoption. You will need to have mechanisms (Process/Patterns) in place that make the parallel usage frictionless in legacy and modern ecosystem so consumers can marry up the data in from both worlds. We use AWS DMS heavily to continuously mirror data assets from old world to new. Use a framework such as fitness functions (based off Building Evolutionary Architecture by Neil Ford, Patrick Kua and Rebecca Parsons) to design triggers based on criteria's that will kick off either manual action taking, thinking or automated transition from one state to another.INSIGHTSCXOAim for small changes ­ key all your data on a singular ID transactionally, operationally, and analyticallyFahad Najeeb
< Page 9 | Page 11 >