Connecting Business with IT to Achieve Agility in the Financial Sector

Santander UK has been on an Agile and digital transformation journey, aiming to create an ecosystem that enables enterprise agility by connecting business with IT and strategy into delivery. In a recent webinar, Joaquim Cols, Director of Operations for Santander Technology UK, described the bank's progress in aligning business with IT processes and KPIs under a single operating model, which includes Agile processes and other work methodologies. The bank's main goals were to accelerate decision making, improve resource management and capacity planning, optimize investment portfolio performance, develop an executive reporting capability, and create an integrated financial model. One of the five questions addressed in the webinar was how Santander made cultural adjustments, to which Joaquim responded by providing a governance framework that aligns the work of different roles to company objectives, KPIs, and cadence, with a good balance of rigor and flexibility. Another question addressed how reporting is used for different stakeholders, which Joaquim answered by distributing a variety of reports for different stakeholders created through Power BI dashboards and FastTrack reports. Santander is currently working on a system to link user stories in Jira and other tools to corporate initiatives.