How a Nordic Bank ramped up service development speed: A happy marriage between SIAM and Agile
Competition in the digital service market is brutal these days. New companies offering purely digital services and products pop up left and right. Many businesses with more tangible products and services have added digital services to their portfolios. How can your business compete in this savage landscape? The case of this Nordic Bank provides some good cues.
Digital service development needs to be fast and flexible if you wish to keep up with the changing business landscape. At the same time, you need to manage your digital services and supplier ecosystem efficiently. It is the only way to ensure business continuity and an excellent user experience.
Bringing agile development methods and SIAM (Service Integration and Management) together is possible even in a demanding environment – like that of a bank. It also brings significant benefits: when the whole process runs smoothly, digital business flourishes, and digital service user experience remains top-notch. You will see:
- Less manual work
- Better visibility to work and information availability
- Fewer errors in workflows
How can you bring agile and SIAM together? Our expert shares his insights
A forerunner hungry for more
We recently had the pleasure of working with a Nordic Bank, which has been a forerunner in agile development in the financial sector in the Nordics. They have transformed their organisation into what a modern financial institution should be. They have invested in building service integration and applied what they have built and learned to internal and external services alike.
The company realised this was not enough – they are forerunners in agile, after all. The evolution of methods and services was mainly done separately. This led to a sub-optimal value chain from development to service. In practice, this caused hiccups and a waste of productive time.
To smooth out the bumps of the process, we joined forces to marry together the development and service phases. To fix the process bottlenecks we decided together to change both ways of working, and the integration between development and service management tools.
Finding what is good and sharing the knowledge is key to growth
Together with this Nordic Bank, we were able to streamline the teams’ work and bring better visibility to it. Manual work was cut down and errors in workflows were reduced. Work efficiency and knowledge availability went up.
Now, the company is onboarding new teams through training in these new ways of working. This has also opened the chance for dialogue and for building better-shared understanding. A common goal and effective communication provide a great base to drive organisational change forward.
Even if you do not operate in the financial field or if your starting point is completely different from that of our Nordic Bank, you can use the same approach to bring agile and SIAM together. That means, you can also gain the same benefits, as this Nordic Bank did.
Timo Ahonen is Senior Advisor and CTO for Management and Integration of Services at Sofigate. His core expertise is in managing, developing, and leading IT and digital services in global environments.
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