Digitalization of Financial Services in the Age of Cloud

Chapter 1. Strategy and Digitalization

“Strategy is the art of manipulating an environment to gain a desirable outcome.”

—Simon Wardley, researcher and creator of Wardley Mapping

This book helps you build a successful technology strategy for digitalization in a financial services organization. When I (Russ) hear the word strategy, I tend to think of a blurrily defined set of ideas, often captured on PowerPoint slides that simultaneously manage to have too much and too little information on them. Strategies of this sort are usually combined with a power lunch, handwaving and applause, and lots of nodding followed by a concerted effort to ignore those slides for another year of manic work activity. I used to think strategy was where bad ideas go to die.

Not anymore. Strategy can be the difference between an organization’s life and (slow) death. For organizations that have almost entirely nailed their colors to technology, such as financial services, a technology strategy becomes not where good ideas go to die but where crucial discussions and actions go to live.

What Is Strategy?

At the risk of explaining one hard-to-pin-down term with a set of others, strategy is situational awareness and anticipation of the future, combined with decision making, packaged up in a healthy loop of learning. Strategy is what you use to decide how to play a game, in our case the game of investment in technology. Your technology strategy captures your complex environment from a technology perspective ...