Assignment Rubric

Challenge: Unicornec Inc. is the largest bank in the region, based on capital value. It has  been in existence for over a decade and have established itself as a natural choice  among masses due to its superior products and high number of physical  engagement channel, primarily the bank branches. Given the region conditions,  engagement of customer through branches have worked very well for this  institution however for quite some time now, they have been seeing continuous  decline in the profit rates, products engagement. Even though they still are  among top three banks with such large customer base, still they have had  difficulty in utilizing their existing resources to materialize new business.

During an preliminary study carried out, it was noticed that bank’s IT systems are  bulky and sluggish. The rigidity among system causes innovative ideas take  longer than acceptable to make it to market, often later than acceptable. Another  wing of study documented the customer discontent due to lack of transparency,  and scarcity of customer engagement channels which also limits the adoption of  banking products.

As the first tool of choice, I used the visualization tool to create the enterprise  system view so that all the involved parties have the common understanding of  the as-is systems. There were various views created for the stakeholders  according to the area of concern and/or interests. I then created block diagrams  from logical and functional aspects for individual systems to identify the  opportunities of decomposition, improvement and scope. During the  decomposition of systems, we carried out interviews of various teams in IT as  well as business, to nail down key functions and their service providers. We also  realized the relationship various decomposed components and elements to  ensure that components are created as generic functions servicing all  requirements. We employed story telling as well heavily during our interviews to  create establish logical flows of narration and engaging the concerned.

We managed to create one big ecosystem of coarse-grained components which  when put together would work in synergy to fulfil the functions. While it  decomposed the big systems into smaller bits and pieces; it also enabled to have  components which followed one-purpose-one-service principle. Since all the  components are independent of each other, allowing one to add or remove

components at will. It provided scalability, freedom, agility and faster project

deliveries.

The insights on the thought process applied were driven the microservices  principles of the technology world. Once the decomposed components layer or  call it, microservices layer, is ready; organization could hypothetically add infinite  number of services/components to this layer as well as plug-in more channels  while ensuring at-par quality of service. An failure (if at all any), can be easily and  quickly corrected by supporting components.

There are certain things which could had been done differently in the  organization which could had avoided the discomforts. The systems should not  had been implemented in silos and collaboration would had been promoted by  executive management. In above mentnioned approach, we could improved  further by revamping channels themselves instead of focusing completely on the  business logic. Learning launch would help to rollout such system with fewer  components (but key components) to do pulse check and learn from findings  before applying the changes across the organization.

