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.

Everyone involved in Financial Services change will 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 separating product and adviser charging for RDR, exploring the nuances of counterparty exposure for Solvency2 or calculating the volumes and associated processing for auto-enrolment opt-outs, it always pays to draw pictures of what things will look like when you’ve finished before you start changing them.

Now with even greater pressure on budgets and a ballooning portfolio of mandatory change, 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 picture-based approach to exploring business change
• A repository of common types of change in Financial Services
• A framework which applies the right pictures to each type of change
• 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 your change function.