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New York

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2008

Brian's blog archive

2016 (2)

Brian Slater

Founding partner at Eikos Partners

Message Posts: 2 Comments: 9

Bio A founding partner of Eikos Partners, a NY consulting firm specialising in servicing IT in Capital Markets with strategy, management, process and execution. Career History Over 30 years in IT in the financial industry at major US firms, most recently CIO of Capital Markets IT.

Blogs

Why does innovation favor the bold?

11 Aug 2016

Innovation is defined simply as a "new idea, device, or method". However, innovation is often also viewed as the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated needs, or existing market needs. As defined in Wikipedia. It’s always difficult to foretell the future, especially the future in the capability, place an...

The Value of DevOps

08 Jul 2016

IT has long grappled with the question of what value DevOps provides, something we have discussed elsewhere. Methodologies used in IT also bring a similar question, if its more efficient how much, and therefore is it something we should consider changing to from our current way of doing things. DevOps has the same questions attached to it. DevOps ...

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Brian is Commenting on

Design Thinking pays off for BBVA

This presents an interesting view on the impact of a customer-first approach to developing applications, and the level of success that can be achieved measurably in business growth. Whilst we’re not privy to detail of what was delivered, it demonstrates the customer activity improvements which will drive revenue. Although in this case the external customer was the recipient of design thinking, this approach can just as easily be applied to any internal users, who often deal with multiple apps - most of which were designed where ease of use was an afterthought. Worse, these apps were designed limited to a silo of activity, a number of which need to be manually orchestrated to enable a single business action, with the human being the workflow engine. Where design thinking plays its role is to force us back to thinking of what the user is trying to achieve. This goal may be very different than simply bringing the workflow back inside the technology as quite often this workflow will have evolved from its manual days. Tied to an agile iterative process, design thinking, itself iteratively aligned, provides for a much more efficient interaction between user and the services provided by the technology. It also yields significant productivity improvements internally and client attraction externally. Either way, that's bottom line impact. Underpinning this process, an open source toolkit combined with the right methodology can support the idea to implementation continuous delivery model. Ultimately, it’s all about matching the delivered efficiencies with those of the process that will get you there, efficiently.

01 Dec 2017 Reply Read article

MasterCard targets startup vibe with relaxed dress code

Oh, yes - ping pong with the CEO will really change the culture! Its not April 1st still is it? Typical "googlization" getting the wrong end of the stick. Its really about inspiration, motivation, collaboration, flattening out the organization and hiring the right people, why mention college grads, on what basis do you think thats the right person? work circumstances, yes open areas, eye sight contact, lots of whiteboards help, but heavy corporate process will not work. Didn't mention open, agile, flexible, collaborative - just xbox's and ping pong. American corporate management at its best as usual (sadly)

07 May 2015 Reply Read article

Tablets to surge in banking - one platform to rule them all

Many have already bought iPads/iPhones and probably won't change horses easily - many companies dropped their resistance to iPhones and I know of others where they provide support to iPads, so the horse may have bolted, especially in senior management. As we are all aware financial firms are becoming engaged in a war around the mobile device, and the standard mantra is "develop for iOS first, then Android, then maybe...." The big question is whether IT really has any control over the direction at all, the long rearguard action on Windows and Blackberries has not won them any more fans in a lot of firms - and they don't have that many to start with! You seem to have control over your choices, as I do, but the vast majority don't, but quite honestly the array of tools out there make keeping synch across multiple platforms no really an issue, and with more of the available solutions becoming cloud enabled (certainly externally and private clouds are now growing) is the platform as important as it was?

02 Jul 2012 Reply Read article

Tablets to surge in banking - one platform to rule them all

Be that as it may, I think you have to consider the fact that most of the financial industry has only just started the move to Windows 7 after taking 2 years to get those plans going. Its likely they will continue down the Windows 7 path for the rest of this year into next, and then assume the same latency on Windows 8 - so we are talking 2014-15 before you see any mass. So the benefits of a Windows 8 ecosystem is going to be staccato.

02 Jul 2012 Reply Read article