Digitalization of Financial Services in the Age of Cloud

Chapter 2. Starting with the End in Mind

Naive digitization was so frequently a bad return on investment precisely because it didn’t focus on transforming the business processes. This is where digitalization’s opportunity arises—imagining how your chains of value can leverage the promise of technology, in particular cloud technologies, creating an opportunity for real, tangible returns on investment.

The opportunity, of course, needs to be balanced with greater risk. Every aspect of your strategy will be a trade-off between various returns on investment. The potential for higher returns in digitalization comes with a greater risk of missing the mark. In this chapter, you will explore how to start with the goal in mind, what your digitalization strategy will deliver, and how you will then be able to rapidly iterate across your value chains as you look to manifest that value.

Show Me the Return on Investment (ROI)!

Digitalization starts with a different question than digitization:

While digitization refers to the act of making analog information digital, digitalization is all about moving existing processes into digital technologies. In other words, digitization is for information, whereas digitalization is for processes.

—Kihara Kimachia, “What Is Digitization vs. Digitalization vs. Digital Transformation?”

Digitization began with “How can we leverage technology to digitize our existing business documents and automate their processing?” Digitalization is founded on the question ...