Engineering

Digital product engineering organizations have demonstrated experience in launching cloud-native products. Organizations are aligned to the Agile/DevOps/Cloud triad. There is a breakdown for more future-looking roles like technology architects and delivery-focused engineering. Digital engineering organizations have adopted long-standing technology company career paths for non-managerial technology career paths.

Score: 100-80

Section Scoring

100 - 80 PTS

There are technology architects and engineers with digital product development and domain experience to partner with the Chief Digital Officer organization. These resources may start aligned by product or be more generalist depending on the product strategy. They are dedicated resources for digital initiatives so that trust, collaboration and skills build over time. There are rotation programs that allow cross-product learning and business product management, product owners or developer experience. Architects and engineers have mature career paths that do not necessarily include the need to manage.

Digital Execution Ready

100 - 80 PTS

Your digital execution organization is building out roles and skills necessary to support domain-specific product delivery. They view the end goal as decreasing time to value. To get started, IT may have retitled senior business analysts with an architect or engineering role. There is heavy reliance on cloud providers or traditional systems implementation consulting, so continuous internal skills building is a gap. The organization is looking for partners to coach/do to accelerate and ensure digital product deployment meets revenue or profit targets and builds skills without waiting for long hiring cycles.

Digital in Process

80-60 PTS

There is limited to no digital engineering capability. Resources are brought on based on project funding and may be dispersed across multiple IT functional teams. To accelerate digital delivery and fill gaps, existing resources are retitled. Reduction in OpEx cost is the primary metric and sourcing strategy driver. Limited options are available for engineering talent to build the necessary skills, much less follow a strategically defined career path. Digital launches lag time-to-value targets due to traditional hiring and onboarding operations.

Digital Gaps

60-0 PTS

Questions & Answers

The question-and-answer section outlines why the questions are important, how they are weighted, and what best practice looks like.

Does your digital engineering executive have the authority and experience to be successful

Why we ask this:

A committee cannot manage an engineering organization. The presence of a single, dedicated leader with the appropriate authority to invest, manage and drive digital engineering effectiveness and impact on business results is required.

How we weighed this question:

Experienced and dedicated executive leadership is an indicator of appropriate focus on sustainable digital success.

What best looks like:

The leader has experience in building teams that deliver scalable and reliable digital technology solutions for bespoke priorities. The digital engineering executive manages an organization that creates, captures, and integrates technologies and data to deliver digital product. The executive enables engineers to explore possibilities and develop innovations in a virtual environment. She is aligned with and measures her organization against delivery and/or acceleration of digital revenues/profit targets. She owns budget and decision authority required to rapidly build or scale capabilities and invest in continuous improvement.

Next steps:

If there is a named leader, look at positioning. Due to criticality, the leader should be part of the CIO staff. If she is not, work with your CIO to uplevel to the right person, right role measures and right positioning. You also may want to have the digital engineering leader be a dotted line to you to demonstrate partnership and alignment.

Do you have a dedicated internal digital engineering organization?

Why we ask this:

To achieve digital product strategies, financial institutions are becoming more technology-oriented companies. An indicator is the presence of dedicated digital engineering teams. Executives know to borrow and/or reposition legacy service delivery-focused engineering is not enough.

How we weighed this question:
Investment in a dedicated team shows that a financial institution prioritizes investment in transitioning into more of a technology company as required to achieve digital strategies.

What best looks like:
The business sees digital engineering as a critical partner in better design and planning to increase building performance, price and time-to-market predictability. The financial institution, therefore, invests in and measures the digital engineering organization’s ROI based on boosting innovation, low-risk testing, consistent/predictable delivery and data-driven traceability across digital architecture.

Next steps:

If your CIO has not invested in a dedicated digital organization, work on an MVP organization and how you will partner to invest and build.
If the IT organization has established a dedicated digital engineering organization, ensure digital revenue/profit contribution and acceleration are primary KPIs.
If the digital engineering organization is primarily built from existing resources, invest in partners that will accelerate skills building through a coach/doer model.

How would you assess your engineering organizations’ ability to strategically partner with you to find and align leading new technologies against business strategy?

Why we ask this:

Digital engineering organizations must look at future technologies and recommend how they apply them to business strategies. Current product execution-focused organizations aren’t positioned to support the future and cannot be effective innovation partners to the business.

How we weighed this question:

The ability to balance leading-edge exploration against here-and-now delivery is a strong indicator of engineering to flex as needed rather than operate in react-only mode.

What best looks like:

The digital engineering organization continuously invests in examining, testing and demonstrating technologies and how they apply to future digital business strategies.

Next steps:

Start with the known. Align your engineering leadership on the near, next and later technologies critical to digital product delivery. Work through priorities and tradeoffs between now and future focuses.
Establish KPIs for proactively managing future engineering competencies.

Do you review engineering effectiveness against business targets and have regular discussions on improvements with your engineering executive?

Why we ask this:

Most traditional enterprises are oriented toward reviewing what has happened. Better value is delivered if less time is spent in preparation and/or review of historical data. When outcome or operational metrics are evergreen, executives can spend more time in decision-making and problem-solving over reviewing.

How we weighed this question:

This score is heavily weighted because it goes to perceived value of engagement between business and any execution arm.

What best looks like:

The engineering scorecard is evergreen. Discussions between digital strategy or business owners and engineering executives, therefore, focus on problem-solving or decisions about what is next or where to do more. These discussions have shifted business and execution engagement from oversight/order execution to partnership. At will, back and forth builds trust and partnership over reviewing historical project or other delivery data on a regular or irregular basis.

Things to look for when working on improving on this question:

Simplify – work with your engineering leadership to define a small subset of engineering key indicators. These indicators should map to an effective maturity level and where IT is in terms of building digitally effective execution teams.
Value test – is the data/metric the minimum required to drive a decision about where to invest more and how to strengthen strengths or weaknesses? Especially in the early stages, too many operational metrics may be an anti-pattern.
Iterate.

Resources

For a deeper understanding of Engineering, read these articles.

Relevant Blog Posts:

How to Create Successful Sample Apps

Stop the Jam, Start Drawing

Taking the Pain out of Documentation

Workbook Sections