PODCAST: AI, the cloud and the future of skills

When I began my career, I was fixing physical servers while sitting in a data center. The role of the cloud has meant that particular function is no longer required – but it’s also no longer particularly rewarding. 

"Popular commentary is over-playing the short-term impact of trade wars”

To keep people engaged, we must bring them along on the journey.

No matter what role someone plays in an organisation or what industry they’re in (but particularly for IT) one key mantra is being very clear on who your customer is.

Once that’s clear it’s important to ensure the right sensors are in place for constant feedback on their changing requirements and making sure products or services are evolving too. 

{CF_AUDIO}

In my organisation we’ve used a lot of automation - mainly behind-the-scenes - to help provide a better service to our customers. However, we recognise we need to be moving faster in that area.

From little things

At one point, the bank was running 16 little pilot projects to explore how we could use chat bots. You want people to be curious; you want people to be innovating, however there’s a risk that we won't get to scale unless we can consolidate these efforts and build an element of enterprise capability.

Eventually, we could have an environment where different projects can go to the “automation app store” if you like and pull things out that they can use in their projects.

This helps us get better as an organisation by creating products and services which can be repeated and reused in multiple projects.

Walking in the clouds

Banking is a highly regulated industry and we must ensure the direction we're taking with things like the cloud is in line with where the regulators would like us to be.

The good news is that over the last couple of years, both internally and externally, things have continued to evolve. And a key element of the journey we are about to embark on (versus the one we have been on previously) is how we can extend our enterprise into the cloud.

However we have many environments that are less easily modernised.

But we don't simply say “let's move entire the entire environment” – instead, let's look at workloads, make sensible decisions both commercially and technically and start to think about guiding principles for the new applications being delivered.

There is clearly a role for the cloud to play but we are always mindful of customer expectations and the environment we have and continue to operate in.

You can find a podcast I recorded with the Chief Operating Officer of TCS, NG Subramaniam, at their Summit late last year which covers more on these topics above.

Gerard Florian is Group Executive – Technology at ANZ