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DevOps in Banking: What are the 5 things you need to know as a Transformational Leader?
A broader view towards evolving journey a leadership using DevOps philosophy needs to go through
Challenges to implement DevOps in banking
5 qualities that would help for digital transformation in banking
What is DevOps?
DevOps combines cultural philosophies and practices with tools that help for bringing out digital transformation in organizations which are ready to embrace high velocity and tremendous improvement opportunities at a faster pace.
These practices are meant to help the customers, these organizations serve in a better way. The development and operations tasks are not siloed in this cycle. These two teams actually work as a cross functional team right from development to deployment to bring about quality product or a service at par.
DevOps in banking
DevOps processes are employed for optimizing delivery pipelines & operational workflows in software based products.
DevOps has come to help for the new age financial organizations to come out of the legacy systems and cater to changing customer demands well. As more and more products and services are shipped to customers in a faster way, DevOps processes help for greasing those wheels a bit and get things going by use of information technology based architecture.
Challenges to implement DevOps in banking
Data privacy, ever changing regulations, and stronger restrictions that are coming in to secure the networks that run fintech operations need special attention, when working in a DevOps based environment
The product lifecycle in fintech space requires complete tracking and governance for monitoring each and every step in the developmental stage.
Most fintech products run on APIs and thus require seamless integration with third-party applications.
The processes in fintech space are bound to go through certain audits and checks that don’t have room for defects and errors and thus require meticulous attention to each and every detail.
With more and more banking systems now adapting to role based access controls for different roles in the organization, it is necessary to be inclusive for such personnel in the DevOps processes.
5 qualities that would help for digital transformation in banking
Following are the five attributes that will help the leadership in banking organizations for digital transformation from the legacy systems to digital first identity.
Cultural transformation
This is an important quality, rather a pre-requisite when it comes to adapting to the DevOps philosophy. DevOps is itself amalgamation of two words development and operation, which implies breaking the siloes of people working principally in these two teams and also a culture of collaboration to be imbibed in the organization as a whole. Involvement of development teams in the final stages of product deployment and maintenance will help the product teams know about the bottlenecks. It also helps for promoting collaboration and interoperability between the teams as and when required.
Assessment of transition
Before going on to adapt the digital transformation processes to determine the existing capabilities and to know the gaps to be covered helps for estimating the timeline for the transition. Existing information technology related capabilities will help the teams to make those intrinsic change and attain maturity in DevOps principles.
Optimization of methodology
Banks and financial services are on the cusp of transforming into digitized models. More and more banks are taking the digital routes. Adapting to methodologies that are ahead of agile methodologies create a need for the orgs to define their ways in establishing advanced execution for attaining desired state. This will help these banking organizations to come out of the lethargy of conventional banking systems. Agile methodologies also help for working in a collaborative ways and without the silos.
Automation
Automation is a key part of DevOps process steps. DevOps advocates automation right from processes that involve planning, development, integration, quality assurance, environment and configuration management, infrastructure provisioning, deployment, monitoring, and feedback. Finding that perfect fit for the tech stack that the organization has in terms of skills possessed by its workforce with the tools that use automation is the match that forms crucial step when it comes to employing digital transformation.
Upskilling the workforces
Upskilling the workforces is a continuous process. In most organizations that go long on IT based architectures upskilling forms a part of their regular day. If the leadership is pro about its workforce to get upskilling boosts when the need arises, rather by anticipating the arising need would greatly help the teams to cope with the rocks that might present themselves in the transformation stages from traditional to DevOps processes. A World Economic Forum report states that more than 55% of BFSI sector employees would require upskilling as the banking sector is gradually going through a tectonic shift in terms of adaptation of APIs and what not!
References:
https://aws.amazon.com/devops/what-is-devops/#:~:text=DevOps%20Cultural%20Philosophy&text=With%20DevOps%2C%20the%20two%20teams,services%20they%20provide%20to%20customers.
https://www.tcs.com/content/dam/tcs/pdf/Industries/Banking%20and%20Financial%20Services/BFS-DevOps-Catalyst-Dig-transformation.pdf
https://www.leewayhertz.com/digital-transformation-in-banking/