Cloud workforce implications for financial services organizations

Cloud-enabled workforce: A business imperative

Gaining momentum in the past five years—and accelerated by the seismic disruption to work, workforce, and workplace caused by the COVID-19 pandemic—cloud adoption is shifting from a business priority to a business imperative.¹

And, although the market performance drivers in the financial services industry have remained consistent, top-performing organizations are increasingly at the edge of this digital disruption across the business landscape. Building a cloud-ready workforce in this new world of work is a talent imperative.

However, in the urgency and excitement generated by ramp-ups in investments and in new cloud infrastructure and services, even leading organizations are constrained by a limited ability to acquire, upgrade, and/or integrate talent into a workforce that can deliver on the full promise (and full ROI) of cloud adoption.

Cloud-able ≠ cloud-enabled

What to modernize, when, and how are all fundamental questions in an organization’s cloud journey, and executing a strategy that gets these questions “right” has never been more complex.

What many organizations discover in their journey, even with expert planning of their tech stack, is that their cloud adoption is constrained by a lack of strategic planning for cloud’s new demands on talent and the workforce. Talent obstacles are abundant, even at the most technically sophisticated financial services organizations. These obstacles can include lack of technical know-how, poorly defined roles and responsibilities, limited coordination between business units, and failure to retain cloud-ready talent due to cultural practices and outdated ways of working.

Talent obstacles are abundant, even at the most technically sophisticated financial services organizations. These obstacles can include lack of technical know-how, poorly defined roles and responsibilities, limited coordination between business units, and failure to retain cloud-ready talent due to cultural practices and outdated ways of working.

However, realizing full cloud ROI is nearly impossible without a workforce that knows how to strategize, operate, and execute in a cloud environment. Today’s workforce, with today’s skills, cannot realize the full value of cloud investments without a strategic plan for developing cloud-ready, cloud-enabled teams enriched with the new skills and ways of working that will power the next generation of technology solutions in financial services.

Enabling your workforce for the cloud

Developing a tech workforce that is ready to adopt, operate, and execute in the cloud, and an enterprise workforce (including business leaders) that is fully aligned to the cloud vision, will generate more ROI from strategic tech investments in cloud infrastructure.

In cloud-native and cloud-mature organizations, the consistent indicators of workforce cloud enablement are represented by six key success pillars.
 

Looking forward

In the midst of unprecedented disruption, cloud adoption has soared, and it’s often financial services organizations that are leading the way. Cloud’s ability to accelerate the drivers of financial performance is one reason why. However, without the right talent model in place, financial services organizations can flounder on their cloud journey.

Organizations that succeed will leverage their existing strengths, to be sure. They will also realign and reimagine operating models and leadership. Most importantly, though, they will reimagine and reinvent their enterprise talent model to help them take full advantage of the cloud’s transformational promise.

End note

¹ Deloitte Insights, "The future of cloud-enabled work infrastructure: Making virtual business infrastructure work," September 23, 2020