“In the absence of advanced business intelligence and rich customer data, banks develop and deliver digital banking transformation initiatives in the dark.”

This was a moment of truth statement made by the CIO of a retail bank during our discussion on business transformation in the banking sector. Yet, many line of business managers shudder at the very thought of data warehousing. Blame it on unfinished, monolithic technology programmes that failed to keep up with business change and delivered poor value. These were issues faced way before the onset of the digital age with its even greater demand for responsiveness and agility.

In the age of the customer you need to move fast to compete with the digital upstarts. Creating a small responsive development capability is easy. Quickly delivering complex solutions at scale is difficult.

Enterprise Agile exploits early-and-often value delivery using expert scaled Agile teams. Cost control and the need to scale quickly mean that offsite or offshore delivery is a must. But how do you leverage competitive distributed teams without losing the responsiveness and flexibility of co-location?

McKinsey&Company’s  Diversity Matters  project found that companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are  35 percent more likely  to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.

Differing performance levels from companies in the same industry and the same country imply that diversity is a competitive differentiator. The most important drivers that McKinsey identified were:

I'm sure you will all now be aware that leading management consultancy IndigoBlue has recently been acquired by Mastek. As Managing Director and one of the original founders of the company I'm delighted that we have been embraced by the Mastek family.

Fraud is a malicious activity that if you don’t look for, you won’t easily find. And, when you do discover its detrimental effects, it might be much too late in the day when the damage has already been done. Fraud is especially rampant in the financial services sector where it is an on-going threat, both internally and externally. The LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) interest rate fixing where banks falsely inflated or deflated their rates to profit from trades or to improve creditworthiness is one example. The more recent Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) outrage involving banks and other lenders wrongly selling PPI to customers is yet another scandal.