EA Modeling - Banking
In the last couple of posts I looked at some of the reasons that I’ve seen push government entities to be engaging in EA modeling. Today I’m going to consider finance companies.
In a lot of ways, finance organizations are the most generic of the four main industries that we find ourselves working with (the others being government, insurance and healthcare – we have customers from other sectors but it’s noticeable how common these are). That said, the finance customers all seem to have one thing in common – they have a distinct focus on the network infrastructure.
The nature of finance these days is that the connections to other institutions are paramount, so we often see the chief EA of a bank coming from the infrastructure domain; the diagrams and spreadsheets that they supply for their proof of concept evaluations are usually around the infrastructure; and the immediate areas of focus are around infrastructure.
This is what I hear from our finance prospects and customers:
“Which servers host which applications?”
“We need an online way for fault fixers to consult our network maps”
“What are the application communication paths?”
“What are the main dataflows between our systems?”
Now, as I said, they do also have the more common concerns. Especially when they ask about application roadmapping –
“what systems depend on what technologies, and when will they need to be retired or replaced based on the underlying technology stack being decommissioned?” and capability mapping – “what business capabilities are supported by which systems?”
So in summary, finance customers are often a middle ground in terms of their concerns, albeit with the added slant that they have a major focus on the infrastructure.
Next week, I’ll be looking at the drivers expressed by different kinds of insurers.