Digitalization of Financial Services in the Age of Cloud

Preface

Don’t believe the (cloud) hype. Even when we limit the scope to financial services when it comes to strategy, there is no “one way.” We know that now, and we’ve known it for several hundred years.

Why We Wrote This Book

In the late Renaissance, a shift in thinking occurred. Magic and mysticism shuffled into the background, and the scientific perspective and method took hold. Hopes and prayers took a step back, and careful, and sometimes not-so-careful, experimental progress took its moment in the limelight.

In this book, we aim to achieve the same thing on a more modest scale. Countering the myths created by victims of hindsight bias or, worse, vendor-induced overpromises, we wrote this book as a navigational aid to help you avoid the Bermuda Triangle of naive change and instead plot a scientific course to the much-desired return on investment (ROI) of digitalization in the age of the cloud.

We don’t pretend there is one journey to rule them all. Digitalization, as you’ll learn from the get-go, is a complex, sociotechnical evolution that will disrupt your systems and processes. Your journey will be unique, and in this book, we show you how to construct and, iteratively and incrementally, execute a roadmap toward the ROI you seek. It’s your company’s money and your decisions to make; we help you build a strategy and roadmap based on scientific experimentation to give you the best chance of reaching your destination.

Your journey to digitalization ROI is made up of careful ...