I agree strongly on balance between cost cutting and innovation. I would also add that balance is needed in IT decisions. We attempt to maximize IT value on each project and often sub-optimized bank-wide IT value by doing so. By selecting the best application, data architecture, data management system or technology platform for each individual project we have created a conglomeration of data and logic assets, systems software and technology architectures which all add to overall bank IT costs and the cost and time of transforming the bank to align with changing business conditions.

Banks need to focus on optimal banking architectures rather than project “marketectures” if they wish to maximize bank wide IT value. This is an issue in retail, wholesale and investment banking worldwide. Too much IT because we maximize each project IT decision.

Also, we focus on the productivity of our people but seldom look at the portfolio productivity of our IT investment. Portfolio productivity is a measure of how much labor, logic and data, technology and systems software is required to enable a given set of business tasks and processes. We need to focus on improving portfolio productivity through effective architectural decisions.