AMP will "turbocharge" a series of transformation programs over the coming year, from its ongoing move to cloud-only services to newer pushes to stand up a more elastic, software-defined networking backbone.
Group head of technology for modern enterprise infrastructure Abdullah Khan told FST Media’s Future of Financial Services Sydney 2020 conference that Covid-19 had accelerated work on several transformations.
Network and collaboration suite deployments which had been afforded a six-month project window were fast-tracked.
“We went live with a collaboration program during Covid-19 in three weeks for the whole enterprise, work that was planned for a six-month rollout,” Khan said.
Due to the geographically dispersed nature of AMP’s worldwide operations, Khan said further transformation of the network was needed.
“AMP has lots of global offices in Asia Pacific, the UK and North America, and each of those areas has unique needs. Many of our traders are in geographically dispersed areas as well.
“So how we enable our underlying backbone of a network to be more software-defined and elastic is one of the pieces we’re working through. We call it the network transformation program.”
Khan said network transformation was needed to “systematically and programmatically scale and expedite” the delivery of key financial services.
“We can’t scale those if [we] are not software-defined, so we’re working ... to expedite that transformation piece,” he said.
More broadly, Khan said the pace of a number of ongoing transformations - including its cloud migration, which is in its eighth year, and related app modernisation - would increase.
“From an AMP perspective, [we’re] turbocharging our transformation programs which are underway,” Khan said.
“The next step is going to be … a year of delivery for us to deliver those outcomes.”
He said that other transformation work is focused on the use of data to improve customer experience.
Data, he said, could help AMP “get an understanding of what customers need so we can cater for that.”
iTnews revealed AMP’s ‘data’ brain’ project last month, which uses open source and cloud-based technologies to “create organisational intelligence to provide digitised and data-driven experiences.”
Khan said AMP’s success at transforming the organisation would depend on staff and an evolving “symbiotic” operating model involving both business stakeholders and IT.
It would also come down to the timing on the various pieces of work concurrently underway.
“There’s a risk of doing too many things at the same time, depending on how you structure it,” he said.
“The sequencing of those business imperative initiatives need to be understood because there’s always a focus on executing the right way and in a timely manner to extract those benefits.”
Khan said that Covid-19 had proven “an instigator and accelerator” for the company “to achieve what we wanted to achieve anyway.”
“Covid-19 it gave us the opportune time to demonstrate that IT is capable of delivering the business outcome right in time where it’s needed,” he added.
