In any organization, if a simple technology change takes a week, it deserves a closer look. Is the technology too complicated? Is the team shorthanded? Are we waiting for someone else’s schedule? The request may be as simple as adding storage or scheduling a software update. These questions are warranted and the answers can reveal how much (or how little) control your team really has over the infrastructure your organization depends on.
This challenge is at the center of the webinar Take Back Control of Your Core Banking Infrastructure [Webinar Link] from NexusTek and OpenETX, featuring Tom Vermette(OpenETX President and CTO) and Joseph Kasal (NexusTek Sr. Director, Cloud Operations). Explore why even routine technology changes can take so long for banks and credit unions, and what financial institutions can do to regain control.
When a change takes too long, people make adjustments. They stop asking why and build the delay into the schedules, add manual steps, and put off other work. It doesn’t help productivity numbers when people start running reports earlier and when maintenance windows get longer. It’s especially impactful when projects that would have been really helpful get delayed or taken off the table. Each workaround seem manageable on the surface but taken together, they can start to form a growing operational burden.
It won’t help to see every problem as the fault of aging hardware or an IT team that simply needs to work faster. Look beyond the people and equipment and look at where your team’s time is going. How much time are they spending on maintaining the environment, following up on support requests, and working around the same issues over and over?
Tasks as seemingly simple as a software update, configuration change, data request, or maintenance task shouldn’t stop work in its tracks. If they do, these four steps can help you uncover bottlenecks and get better control of the infrastructure.
Ask your team these simple questions. When did we last complete a full recovery test, and what did we learn? For a recent change that we thought would be routine, how long did it take and where did the time go?
The answers should be able to give you an idea of where recurring delays and unclear responsibilities are happening most and what needs attention first.
Look at what happens when your team needs a change to the infrastructure supporting the core. Instead of basing the timing on a third-party’s schedule, can the change be scheduled around your organization’s own priorities? Can your team access the data it needs when they need it, or do they need a support ticket for every new report or data export? When something goes wrong, does your team know exactly who owns it, or does it have to scramble to find the right person?
Your recovery plan may already include backups, replication, and detailed instructions, but does your team know how long will it take to restore the services you need? Testing individual components in a recovery test is a good start, but an end-to-end exercise is critical if you want to be able to see how everything works together, including dependencies and manual steps.
Taking back control of changes to your infrastructure isn’t a one-time thing or an all-or-nothing strategy. To do it right, with lasting value for your organization, it’s better to focus on improving one part of the environment at a time, then test it, and then apply what you learn to decide what to focus on next. That way your team gets a chance to find and fix problems before moving on, so each phase is easier to manage and you stay in control along the way.
Where would greater control could make the biggest difference for your institution? Our integrated model lets you keep control of priorities and decisions while we handle much of the day-to-day infrastructure and application work.
Get the right balance of control and support to help your team move faster.
Watch the webinar. https://www.nexustek.com/take-control-of-core-banking-infrastructure-webinar