Digitalization of Financial Services in the Age of Cloud

Chapter 6. Architecture and Governance

The success of your cloud digitalization strategy hinges on the decisions you make about how to create and evolve your value chains through technology. Crucial to your results are the changes you will make to the large-scale software system structures that support and enable your value chains. That structure is the software architecture.

Software architecture strives to answer just one question: What is the optimal organization and integration of technology that will support the needs of stakeholders and will survive the stresses placed upon it by those stakeholders. Distilled further: What structure do we need to support and survive our stakeholders’ needs and demands?

Your digitalization strategy’s success hinges on establishing, maintaining, and evolving this structure, this architecture, across all of your value chains, meeting all your diverse stakeholders’ needs, while surviving the turbulence of different patterns of change and usage. No mean feat! It’s no wonder that many try to avoid the question of architecture altogether and that people involved in defining architecture tend to be those with the most experience and seniority. The table stakes are just that high.

A helpful metaphor is to think of your system’s architecture as a habitat, that is, an environment or home within which your stakeholders reside. By viewing your systems as a habitat, you don’t look at them as something merely used by your internal and external stakeholders. ...