What is integration in an organisation’s digital or core transformation? In this video, @Stuart Johnson, , Executive Vice President & Partner at Design Intellect Arena and former general manager at Commbank, imparts knowledge on the importance of integration in a digital or core banking project. It is far more complicated than just building an interface into MQ. As part of core banking transformation you must consider the difficulty of integrating into complex back-end systems as you’re moving from batch processing to a real-time system, you need to design for the creation of strong interfaces and you must be aware of the risks with micro services.
@Liberty IT Consulting Group is an Australian I.T. firm which specialises in banking transformations especially core banking and digital transformations, project quality assurance, project governance, advisory and project execution. Our business analysts, project managers, directors, PMO professionals, engineers and agile practitioners are the finest in their field.
TRINA: Stuart, the next one’s for you. It’s well known in the industry that you personally orchestrated implementation of world-leading integration Solutions. You ran the integration piece for banking beyond replacement of core help. On portent is the integration and an organization’s digital or Core transformation
STUART: So firstly, what you’re talking about there, is the start on the journey. Almost 20 years ago, okay? So what we did at the time was absolutely right. We had back-end systems that were cobol, but not only code will, they were the logical thing behind screens. We had platforms built in 1954 on assembler, with their own proprietary, operating system sitting on top of predestinate. So as part of that, we had to integrate into these complex back-end systems and make them easily consumable for the consumers, which we did, that’s what we’re doing for. So we focus on getting a handful of really skilled Engineers during real, the hard lifting and making it easy to consume through web services. Fantastic. Right thing to do at the time. These days when people talk about integration, I worry because it for me, it kind of evokes, think feeling it monolithic or a hub-and-spoke architecture. And you have to hope that Banks of moves a lot down the track so it’s not so hard to integrate to individual systems. And also integration per se is important that it’s a small part. So if you look at what the integration team was doing on core banking, very little of, it was technical integration per se, it was understanding that we were moving from a batch to real-time system and that we removing implicit controls that were there before you because you had back and we had to then replace them with him explicit controls, we got rid of end of day, cash balancing in a branch and so we had to do reconciliation GL.
So to me integration, it invokes a thinking of I’m integrating into NQ okay? But integration is not about that it’s about understanding into end. Okay. So I don’t like the term because when people talk about integration they think I’m building an interface in NQ but that’s not really Integrations. You probably more solution architecture, understanding how things work into it as we move forward. Why is it important? If you look at the Banks, banks moving to more and more of a domain style architecture, where what I mean by that is that section different parts of the business often built domains or platforms. And in that model, they’re free to do whatever they want in your own Circle in their own thing. But they need to have strong interfaces so people know how to interact with them. So that’s important but you’re still again, you still need to know end to end and want to. Lastly, what I will say is that the micro service is not a silver bullet. It will not solve your problems, a micro service in five years. Ten years time, you’ll have 10,000 of things flying around and you won’t know how to manage them and it will be the mess of the century. So integration. It’s not around technical integration, on to NQ. It is around understanding the end-to-end, having defined boundaries and being able to Plug and Play different components into domain architecture.
