Client Situation
Our client is one of the largest banks in Malaysia, with an asset size of over USD 18 billion, serving conventional & Islamic Banking, Investment Banking customers across over 110 branches. The bank’s target customers are across retail, SME, Enterprise & Treasury customers. The bank had a large application & supplier landscape leading to higher dependency on the technology team, suppliers & other service providers. In view of the challenges faced by the technology team, the bank engaged Cedar to assist with developing an IT Blueprint.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar used a 4-step approach to assess the current state of the bank covering the Applications, Technology, Organization, IT Operating models.
- Applications: Cedar reviewed the current application and supplier landscape based on sufficiency, architecture, alignment to business strategy. Cedar reviewed the core banking applications in the landscape from an application sufficiency & alignment to the bank roadmap perspective.
- Technology: Cedar reviewed the hardware, storage, technology components across security, web servers, application servers, databases in use based on alignment with industry best practices.
- Organization: Cedar reviewed the IT Organization structure based on planned resource capacity v/s the actual resourcing across the different units.
- Operating Model: Cedar assessed the operating model across 6 key areas i.e., Governance & Risk Management, IT Operations, Change Management, IT Security, IT Organization skillsets, Performance Measurements & Key performance indicators.
Outcome
The program resulted in defining the way forward for the IT Organization across the following key areas
- Developed the design principles along with the rationale & implications of the target IT applications & technology.
- Defined the Retain/ Replace/ Consolidation of different applications in the bank's landscape
- Developed the Core Banking way forward strategy along with indicative timelines.
- Developed a way forward for the different technology components across Cloud, Hardware, Database, Application & Web Servers.
- Developed the target IT Organization structure across run the bank (RTB) & change the bank (CTB) along with the roles and responsibilities across different areas
- Developed the IT Operating model aligned to RTB & CTB to enable quicker response to BAU challenges while enabling the technology transformation for the bank.
- Defined the IT Scorecard based on the balanced scorecard framework along with the key performance measures.