Sberbank Group: Strategy-2020 mapped its transformation to the hub of an ecosystem
IDGEA plays the leading role in Sberbank’s transformation effort—called Strategy-2020— into a client-centric, AI- and data-driven technology company at the center of an ecosystem. The team introduced a business development platform as a central element of its architecture, comprised of a spectrum of emerging technologies such as in-memory computing, artificial Intelligence, blockchain, and open source solutions. It has also introduced process changes such as agile methods and a technical-debt management discipline to strike a balance between emergent design and intentional architecture.
Its journey to transformation started in 2014, when Sberbank decided to move forward from being a traditional bank to being an ecosystem and technology company. Key to architecting the journey was the business capability map initially created in 2011. This enabled a dialog between the business and IT as the EA team leaded the transition from standalone bank products to a services approach.
Sberbank moved from managing siloed business processes to creating more granular customer-oriented business services. This added flexibility and allowed the bank to launch new and combined products more quickly. The business capabilities and business services became a basis for its new IT platform, which includes an omnichannel-unified system, a business hub with unified business functions, a business-development platform with product factories, and an enterprise-level data factory with analytical scenarios and reporting.
A key aspect to Sberbank’s transformation was its EA-led overhaul of its software production processes to a Spotify-based approach. It established business and technology tribes, with tribe architecture areas as the basis for EA management. EA dedicated chief tribe architects to each tribe to support each tribe’s movement to its target architecture.
The major focus of the EA team in this new organization is to manage the cross-tribe architectural dependencies. As Sberbank continued to evolve its agile transformation, EA and tribe architects then delegated detailed architecture design to the squad level.
To ensure its evolution to an ecosystem of suppliers, regulators, and consumers, the EA team created ecosystem architects to design the core components of shared services for all participants. Some of the shared services are mandatory for use as the entry ticket for any company that wants to become a full-fledged member of the ecosystem.
EA also created a library of reusable components and tools that enables creation of the solutions for various industries. The platform is the basis for building common ecosystem services such as the global profile of the ecosystem resident, a single authentication service, an open API marketplace, and a data marketplace. The team has established architectural governance for all activities around its ecosystem evolution, and it will launch for all ecosystem participants by 2019.
Bhaskar Shunmugam, lead for IT enterprise architecture at RasGas, said, “Sberbank has successfully taken EA into new frontiers through a well-thought-out plan and excellent execution to solve its complex problem in phases. Its business and technology tribes and the ecosystem are great concepts that can be applicable across various industries. Great job.”