Thoughts on Application Architecture and Design

Most of today financial institutes see IT expenditure as an expense which eats into their profit margins. But, in todays world where you can order virtually anything on the Internet.  Interestingly , you can buy the Moon . But, try buying an insurance or apply for a loan and you would spend anywhere between 1 hour to days to get the policy or loan approved. Why does this happen? Why organisations tend to see IT as an expense rather than as an Investment? From a finances perspective, IT expense does not convert to revenue. Something similar to using fuel in a Taxi. For a taxi driver the taxi is an investment and the fuel consumed is an expense. Even though his taxi does not run without fuel, it is always seen as an expense. This would mean, sometimes it might seem to be a good idea to use subpar fuel to improve profitability. Businesses cannot survive without IT it is the life blood of modern organisations.But from a finances perspective it looks like an never ending ...

One of the problems with large banks is that they are monsters created by mergers and acquisitions. The initial plan would be to merge the software stacks in a phased manner. Identify systems that provide common functionality. Identify costs associated with maintaining and upgrading the systems and software. Select a strategic platform. Start your project to migrate all applications onto the strategic platform. Start Phase 1 Get lost in business process translation. Most of the time it is too hard to merge two software stacks and come up with a single unified strategic platform. Higher Management would see this as a futile exercise and will take a decision to maintain the two systems and merge them in the future to save costs in the short term. Now, from a customer perspective you are a single bank, but the from the bank perspective you are a different customer in each of their systems. To simplify things, let us assume a bank which is standalone and does not have t...