Altus

As specialists in Enterprise Architecture for Financial Services, Altus have long been convinced of the need to model and explore the business and system implications of complex change before embarking on expensive developments. 

In more prosperous times this can be a difficult message to sell as enthusiastic project managers rush to get started on building exciting new solutions. But we have seen enough projects come unstuck after spending many times their initial budget to know that more haste often equates to less speed. Whether it be understanding the complexities of group versus individual business, exploring the nuances of regulation in a new market or calculating volumes of business and the associated processing, it always pays to draw pictures of what things will look like when you’ve finished before you start changing them.

Now with much greater pressure on budgets and a serious pruning of change portfolios, business sponsors are becoming less inclined to let projects rush ahead and work out the detail as they go. Instead, we see calls for greater clarity over what business solutions will look like, more science around impact analysis of portfolio re-planning and a growing appreciation of the value of architecture governance.

At Altus our recipe for successful architecture is still the same but it does seem that the key ingredients are even more appropriate in the current climate:

• A proven, picture-based approach for exploring business change

• A repository of common types of FS change and the pictures that are needed

• A low-cost, incremental method for establishing enterprise architecture

• A disciplined approach to architecture review

Together with our many years of experience of complex change in the Financial Services industry, it’s a recipe which makes Altus ideally placed to get the most out of limited budgets.