entry into a new technological cycle
Good day to you!
I am Dmitry, I am the head of IT at a relatively young and small fintech company Tokeon, which deals with digital financial assets (DFA) and hybrid digital rights (HDR).
I like the immodest assertion that these tools will allow us to create a new financial market. We already know the words “blockchain” and “smart contract” from the world of cryptography. The words “scam” and “stomping hamsters” also came to us from the world of crypto. Crypto has become an outstanding example of how an ingenious technical solution is used by scammers on a global scale.
The new DFA instrument is regulated by the state, which means it can potentially direct technical genius in a reasonable direction and give us a fundamentally new financial toolkit. A toolkit executed by the logic of smart contracts (independent of the conditions of a particular business or political party) and the transparent blockchain data storage system (independent of the mood of the software authors and infrastructure holders).
And since we are talking about a fundamentally new approach to finance, the conversation will also turn to a new approach to technologies and management methodologies.
About technology
The most important change in the IT world over the past 20 years, in my opinion, is that IT people (including myself) were forced to change their understanding of users. From “despised users”, our users have ascended to the pedestal, becoming the center around which the product and technological solution is built. It doesn't matter how technologically advanced your product is. If it is inconvenient, it will be swept away into the basements of search queries and will remain with a small audience of enthusiasts.
Being clear and as accessible as possible is a key priority for any new product.
Easy to measure performance
This rule should be applied not only to IT technologies, but also to financial models. You can juggle with smart words as much as you like (“blockchain”, “hash of release decisions”, “business analysis”, “business architecture”, etc.), but all word forms will be summed up in a cynical and simple conclusion.
Just ask the following questions:
Can the product attract enough users?
Can the product provide the expected return to the system operator, investors and issuers?
How adequately are the risks of using the product covered?
These questions can be answered intuitively, and the result is clear. And the means of implementation have been and will remain secondary issues.
Variability of results
With such a flexible financial instrument offered, don't get your hopes up too much. Current success can quickly give way to failure. IT is a cruel world where diamonds sometimes appear under monstrous pressure. We strive to take our place in the glittering row of jewels, oblivious to the coal dust that litters the floor around the press.
The world of finance is no more humane and here, too, you cannot be calm and confident in the future – this is a path to failure.
Whatever technology stack we talk about today, it will be different tomorrow. People's ability to learn and motivate them to change is a key advantage.
People
The rapid change in technology has a significant impact on people. Like the people who benefit from the end result of using the technology. The same applies to people implementing this technology itself.
From being stalwart advocates of our favorite “correct” approaches and products, we must move to a “learner’s attitude,” looking broadly at the world around us and eager to absorb new things.
For the manager, this is expressed in the recommendation not to load the employee with OS at 100% load. This idea is partly reflected in the concept of SRE, where it is recommended to set a limit on operating activities. We need to leave time for “new things” – searching for conceptual solutions, new approaches and broadening our horizons.
Management methodologies
Everything written above noticeably shakes such bright principles as “controllability”, “predictability”, “transparency”. Obviously, the management methodologies known to us will have to be expanded taking into account realities.
Key terms
People (and roles) — in the broadest sense, this super category can include users/clients, employees, partners and, in general, all people involved in our processes. We group people into roles to highlight common attributes and characteristics, but recognize that one person can fill different roles. And one role can correspond to one or many people.
Artifacts – again, in the broadest sense, an artifact is an artificially created entity. These are technologies, introduced (other people's) products or our own products.
Processes — processes take place between people, between artifacts, between people and artifacts. The development and optimization of these processes are management functions. Maintaining processes and responding to risks – operations, maintenance. Monitoring processes and making recommendations for their development is an architectural and analytical function.
Metrics — a way to measure the success of a process. Metrics need to be built hierarchically, starting with the most important criteria for the business/strategy that determine the fundamental conclusion about success. We will call such criteria key metrics. Key metrics are decomposed into subordinate metrics – more capacious and specific criteria for specific processes, people, artifacts. Metrics will allow you to navigate changes and make informed decisions regarding the big picture.
Blurred boundaries
New demands for flexibility and maximum speed of response to change mean that the interfaces and connections between people and artifacts must be as effective as possible. It is necessary to minimize the loss of time on interaction.
And this, in turn, means that people in a role cannot be fenced off from each other with “areas of responsibility”, forming barriers. The language of business will become closer to the languages of IT, the languages of IT to the language of lawyers, and so on.
Here is an example of how Roman Piontik describes the distribution of architectural functions: https://habr.com/ru/articles/771608/. Following the architectural one, similar concepts will arise for business functions and everything else.
Clear quality ratings
In modern business there is little time to hold extensive meetings to understand whether we are doing or not doing well. All quality information should be collected in a single source and provide real-time information without requiring significant human time and artifacts to collect this information.
Maximum delivery speed
Businesses expect maximum speed of solution delivery. This leads to the following tasks:
Minimizing the cost of translating (analyzing) business requirements into the implementation language
Minimizing implementation costs
Minimize verification/testing costs
Minimizing the cost of implementing changes
Obtaining information about the behavior of changes in the market, clear feedback for formulating new tasks
Conclusions
We can argue about the way to solve these problems and the reasonableness of their formulation. Which does not change the fact that:
these tasks are being set before us today
we will have to solve these problems.
the priority of these tasks will increase over time
And if the solution to these problems is inevitable, then it is necessary to offer solutions.
For today it is:
The most flexible CRM system that allows you to manage tasks and processes. We have supplemented the standard functions of the task tracker with data export to our own database for advanced analytics and metrics that we capture in real time.
A minimalistic BI system with the ability to quickly customize, a large number of integrations and aggregation of data from various sources in a “single window”. In our case, this is Apache Superset with integration with 4 Postgres schemas and a MySQL instance
Kubernetes cluster orchestrator, which allows you to deploy not only our containers, but also new clusters at minimal cost. In our case – Deckhouse from Flaunt
Organization of the architectural process in the form of design and description of the metamodel of the company, business, internal processes and documentation. We solve this problem with the help of DocHub, whose repositories include All IT staff
Enterprise artificial intelligence for aggregating information and presenting this information in a human-readable form. In our case, this is RAG based on Yandex LLM
Let me draw your attention to the fact that these tools are not only reasonable in cost, but also comply with the requirements of our legislation, which means the flexibility of the solution does not come at the expense of security.
However, this state of “today” does not in any way predetermine the state of “tomorrow” and new tools will probably appear that will change everything again and we can discuss this again 🙂
Links and contacts
Community where future architecture methodology is designed: CEAF
My contacts:
telegram: @dmitry_timoshenko
e-mail: d.timoshenko@tokeon.ru
