1. Design Firms – Simon’s challenge involves the bank undergoing a new branding effort. In my experience, a bank’s internal marketing department partners heavily with an outside marketing firm for larger banding initiatives. Additionally, new branding efforts usually involve getting that new brand message out through a variety of channels.
2. Middle-ware/SOA capability – Given the overall growing maturity in the service oriented architecture space and the relative IT budgets of most financial institutions, I am going to assume there is some middle-ware, messaging and/or enterprise service bus-like capability to leverage.
3. Content Management System/CMS – Given the explanation of the current state online banking system, I am going to assume the bank does not currently have a mature content management platform which can be extended to provide online banking functionality.
4. Backoffice – Also, I am assuming that the bank currently has a backoffice transaction system that currently performs the bank’s core bank product transaction needs. For the sake of this exercise, a “legacy” mainframe set of applications are in place that run the core bank transactional services that has some capability to expose those transactions to the middle-ware/SOA platform.
5. Build versus Buy – A classic challenge for banks has been the decision to put the focus on building in-house capabilities versus buying mature vendor solutions and integrating those into the technology portfolio. Depending on the financial health of the bank itself as well as the predilection of the CIO, the build versus buy pendulum can swing to either extreme. Add the frequent turn over of senior IT leadership and this can be a real challenge for enterprise architectural patterns. For the sake of this exercise, the assumption is that the bank is willing to invest in the middle-ware transactional capabilities in-house as well as the supporting online banking application user experience but prefers to purchase a new content management solution to host the UI.
6. Big Bang versus Functional Sequence based rollout – I am also assuming product management is risk adverse and open to sequencing in the new functionality rather than demanding a big bang approach. More on the sequencing later in this post.