Published on the 12/11/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Organisations that connect online with their customers need to lift their game in terms of technology refresh rates or risk losing their interest…
Enterprises need to take a leaf from Apple’s and Google’s books when thinking about end-user application development and releasing regular updates – as often as once every three weeks according to some IT leaders.
According to Rajat Taneja, chief information officer for insurance company Zurich, end users have little tolerance for waiting for major applications refreshes delivered once every 16-18 months. Instead enterprises needed to “think three years ahead but deliver every three weeks,” he says, delivering new features rather than entire new products.
Also speaking at FST Media’s future of banking conference in Sydney last week St George chief information officer Dhiren Kulkarni however noted the need to achieve a balance between rapid rollout and consumer-fatigue saying, “we don’t want to bombard people daily, weekly or monthly – so we are doing it quarterly” which he said was in line with release cycles at Google or Apple.
Bank of Queensland chief information officer Julie Bale, who is preparing to overhaul the bank’s technology infrastructure in early 2014 after eight years’ relative lack of investment, said that one of the greatest challenges facing IT leaders was meeting surging demand both from internal users and customers. “Current lifecycles are not going to cut it,” she warned.
Bankwest CIO Andy Weir meanwhile warned that the emergence of start-ups was threatening to disrupt the value chain for financial service providers and that incumbents had to respond or risk losing market share. “Big monolithic projects running three to six months are not good enough. We have to have feature-based delivery rather than projects.”
While speakers at the conference naturally concentrated on the financial services sector the views will resonate for chief information officers of other sectors – for example in retail, telecommunications or transport – which are also grappling with ever-increasing consumer demands coupled with start-ups threatening to upset the status quo.
Weir noted that consumers were now registering a stark difference between the level of services they were getting from start-ups compared to those from traditional business.
As a result organisations needed to “embrace the threat” by speeding the development cycle – but he acknowledged that for many enterprises that would need a rethink about their culture and structure, noting that Bankwest had implemented hackathons to attempt to spark entrepreneurialism among its IT team.
