Digitalization of Financial Services in the Age of Cloud

Chapter 5. Building Your Digitalization Roadmap

Digitalization is a journey, not a destination, and building your roadmap for that journey, as we mentioned in Chapter 3, is no mean feat. Transforming a complex, sociotechnical domain is not a simple sequence of no-brainer changes. The journey can have twists and turns, as shown on the right in Figure 5-1, and especially given all the power and potential of the cloud, naive changes could easily do more harm than good. There’s no digitalization magic wand. Digitalization requires a real roadmap that shows when to evaluate alternative routes, not just a map of a road.

Figure 5-1. What you wish you had to deal with¹ versus what you actually have²

Each of your target returns on investment ( ROIs) is a property toward which you want to move your value chains and your organization. As shown in Figure 5-2, you know your target ROI, you are aware of the climatic patterns that surround and permeate your systems and the industry, and you know you’re dealing with complexity. But how do you know your next step? Where do you start? What do you try first?

Figure 5-2. You know what you want (target ROI), what you have (landscape of value chains), and what you’re dealing with (climatic patterns and your complex sociotechnical system), but what do ...