Large APRA regulated organisation​

Our customer is one of Australia’s largest APRA-regulated wealth and financial services organisations.  Established over 150 years ago, this organisation operates a portfolio that spans banking, home loans, superannuation, insurance and wealth management.

As with many enterprise organisations, they experienced the impact of profound market reshaping afforded by modern cloud technology. They specifically called out the pace and scale at which new business models and entrants are disrupting incumbent businesses.  The impact of this rapid innovative change is further compounded by the introduction of new fintech platforms and prudential pressures (eg: Open Banking). 

This national icon committed to a multi-year cloud transformation journey which focuses not only on technology and capability development but even more importantly on a contemporary cloud operating model. This investment in an operating model is key to scaling and strengthening the business in a controlled and safe manner.

A key program milestone was the consolidation and migration of 700+ workloads spanning multiple legacy cloud and infrastructure platforms onto a standardised contemporary fully managed cloud platform provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), which enables users to deploy mode 1 and mode 2 workloads assured by a set of common security and governance controls.

DigiRen was engaged in a leadership role in the program, responsible for shaping, defining and driving the Operations Integrations for the customer.  In the role, DigiRen worked with the customer to help identify, define and execute on a strategy around a phased release process.

At a high level, developing a Cloud Operating Model entails the identification of roles and responsibilities, gaps, process mapping and systems integration design.  These cover the minimum requirements for an organisation to sustainably manage a cloud environment and realise associated benefits.

DigiRen worked to ensure that each program release had its own target Operating Model with the corresponding fidelity and coverage to meet the business assurance needs from a compliance, risk and audit perspective. Working in an agile, iterative fashion, DigiRen worked closely across business/application owners, target operations teams, the ITSM organisation, the security & audit controls teams and the rest of the program to identify, shape and deliver on release milestones.

DigiRen’s approach centred on adopting automation and product-centric design to developing cloud process, transaction and workflows to deliver the desired outcomes.

Many organisations treat cloud business processes as one-off investments that do not acknowledge or support the rapid change and iteration velocity made possible by the cloud. Taking a product-centric view enabled the organisation to apply an organic lens to these processes.  It allowed them to use structured metrics and life cycle management tools to ensure processes easily flex and evolve to meet the velocity of change demanded by the business.  

An automation-centric approach forces the design team to think about processes as a chain of self-contained scalable, automated “micro services” rather than a set of semi-automated manual and ad-hoc processes. This design approach allowed for a higher degree of automation and resilience with a faster path to production. 

DigiRen was brought onto the project (several weeks late) as an Industry Subject Matter Expert to bring leadership to the Operations Integration (OI) stream [responsible for redefining and scaling the operational flows between the new cloud platform and the customer]. With DigiRen’s support the OI Stream was not only able to catch up but accelerate ahead of the other program streams.  

DigiRen was key to driving scope and alignment on the broader program release milestones including the definition of the initial view of the End State Operating Model (to meet APRA needs).  

Leveraging a Minimum Viable Operating Model Approach, DigiRen established and accelerated a phased path to production to support proof of concept, non-Prod, Production and Production High Material workloads releases. This also included a high-level Operating Model roadmap as well as a design, integration and automation program of work around the customer ITSM platform (ServiceNow).

As a result of this work, the Program was able to shift timelines of releases by up to 2 months, resulting in significant future savings associated with the early decommissioning of a legacy extended support environment.