Digitalization of Financial Services in the Age of Cloud

Chapter 8. Operational Models

Who’s responsible for the operation of your value chain? When your value chains move from dream to critically-relied-upon, will-end-up-on-the-front-page-and-in-jail-if-wrong reality, who is accountable and responsible becomes a very serious question. The answer that used to be acceptable to everyone, especially financial services institutions, was to split that responsibility between those who plan, those who build or supply,¹ and those who run.

And that worked. When timelines for change were measured in years, and projects measured in months, handoffs between building, or engineering, and running, or operations, could be accommodated. Engineering naturally attracted developers who happily did not need to know how their stuff ran, and operations naturally attracted those who worried about little else. The world was a happy place…

...except it wasn’t. This was not a friendly environment. “Can I get this past test and make it Operations’ problem?” may not have been an explicit credo for software developers, but it was a tempting and evidential stance. Implicit acceptance of how the system ran as “not Development’s problem” was the norm, and that understandably led to the amplification of Operations’ natural tendency to be risk averse. This was especially true in financial services where regulatory, auditability, governance, and a host of other concerns sat firmly on Operations’ shoulders yet could be blissfully ignored by Development.

Development was ...