If you're planning, building, or implementing a cloud strategy that supports digitalization for your financial services business, this invaluable guide clearly sets out the crucial factors and questions to consider first. With it, you'll learn how to avoid the costly and time-consuming pitfalls and disappointments of cloud adoption and take full advantage of the cloud operational model. You'll discover cloud tactics that unlock the benefits of digitalization and how to create a cloud strategy that has the flexibility to streamline operations, integrate channels, and encourage innovation in your firm.
Packed with invaluable advice and real-world case studies, this book will show you how to
Select the right operational models for your needs
Build resilience into your company's technologies
Assess the trade-offs of third-party digital native services versus developing them in-house
Ensure operability across cloud services providers
Balance innovation and accountability
Deal with digitalization issues of particular importance in finance, such as governance, security, and regulatory compliance
Author(s): Jamil Mina, Armin Warda, Rafael Marins, and Russ Miles
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Year: 2023
Language: English
Commentary: raw & unedited
Pages: 702
Preface
Why We Wrote This Book
How to Use (or Navigate) This Book
Conventions Used in This Book
Using Code Examples
O’Reilly Online Learning
How to Contact Us
Acknowledgments
Jamil Mina
Armin Warda
Rafael Marins
Russ Miles
I. Digitalization and Cloud Strategy
1. Strategy and Digitalization
What Is Strategy?
The Purpose of Digitalization
Cloud Adoption Disillusionment
Digitalization Versus Digitization (and Cloudification)
Digitalization, Strategy, and Cloud
Getting Started: Parts of a Digitalization Strategy
2. Starting with the End in Mind
Show Me the Return on Investment (ROI)!
Value Chains and Business Perspectives
Value Chain Capabilities Through the Lens of ROI
Gathering the Right Perspectives
Establish Your Strategy Quickly, Reevaluate Continuously
Collecting the Parts of Your Digitalization Strategy
II. Financial Services Digitalization in Context: Landscape and Climate
3. Mapping the Landscape
Mapping the Situation
What Is a Wardley Map?
Your Anchor and Your System Components
The Value Chain Axis
From Uncharted to Industrialized
Exploring Your Value Chain
4. Climatic Patterns in Financial Services
Climatic Pattern 1: Financial Services, Everywhere
Trust and Risk Distribution
Diverse Products, Globally Accessible: Embedded Finance
“X, Everywhere” Is a General Climatic Pattern
Climatic Pattern 2: No Business Is an Island
Climatic Pattern 3: Lower Technology Barriers to Entry
Climatic Pattern 4: Emphasis on Speed, Scale, and Agility
Climatic Pattern 5: Sustainability Matters
Climatic Patterns Change
III. Strategic Digitalization Doctrine
5. Building Your Digitalization Roadmap
The “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once!” Anti-Pattern
Iterative and Incremental with Experiments
Building Your Digitalization Experiment Backlog
Learning from Experiments
The Importance of Stories
Lessons Learned from “Learning from Incidents”
Continuously Reevaluating Your Strategy and Roadmap
Introducing Experiment Templates
Experiment Template: Explore Continuous Delivery
6. Architecture and Governance
Exploring the Structure That Supports, or Hinders, Your Value Chains
Modularity and Cohesion Matter
What Does Good Modularity Look and Feel Like?
Modules in Action: Services, Applications, Bounded Contexts, and Platforms
Architectural Styles in Financial Services
Evolving Architecture: The “Impossible” Job
Residuality Starts with the Naive
What Survives?
There Can Be Only One: What Survives, Wins
Governing the Ungovernable
The Parable of the Ignored (Cloud) Architects
Making the Architecture Unignorable by Making Production Unignorable
Governance: Proactive, Continuous, Chaos Engineering
Evolving Governance
Architecture and Governance Experiment Templates
Experiment Template: Cloud Variants
Experiment Template: Cloud Native
Experiment Template: Wrap and Retire Legacy Platforms with APIs
7. People, Process, and Organizational Structure
The Hidden Life of Teams
Production Is (Not) the Problem
The Problem of Hierarchical Organization Chart Thinking
From Project to Product
Why Teams?
Establishing and Evolving Your Teams
Team Topologies: Teams and Interaction Styles
Wardley Mapping: Explorers, Villagers and Town Planners
Governance for Teams
People, Process, and Organizational Structure Experiment Templates
Experiment Template: Open Collaboration
Experiment Template: Configuration and Infrastructure as Code
Experiment Template: GitOps
Experiment Template: Shifting Security Left with DevSecOps
Experiment Template: Progressive Delivery
8. Operational Models
DevOps
Focus on Flow and Feedback Loops
You Build It, You Run It…You Go to Jail?!
Segregation Doesn’t Mean Zero Collaboration
Operational Models Experiment Templates
Experiment Template: Surface Everything with Observability
Experiment Template: Site Reliability Engineering
Experiment Template: FinOps
Experiment Template: Engineer Resilience
9. Exploring Paths, Destination Unknown
Can You Stop (and Still Have Gained Value)?
Stop When Done, for Risk, or for Change
Optimize for (Frequent) Learning
Tying the Room Together
Continuous Digitalization
