AFTAs 2014: Best IT Team—Societe Generale

Over the past several years, the bank has been engaged in an aggressive transformation agenda to put IT at the heart of its business. Its ambition is simple: Become an agile enterprise by adopting "Continuous Delivery" practices and allow the business to innovate and adapt faster than the competition.

Two years ago, SocGen, through its global banking and investor solutions team, adopted agile practices on a large scale to reach over 60 percent of the bank's project portfolio. At the same time, the bank's technology team built out its IT infrastructure to tackle development and operations challenges.

The value unleashed to SocGen's business has allowed it to reduce its time to market significantly with a return on some multi-million-dollar investments in just 12 months. It has also allowed it to free up capacity, and continue to innovate and contain its cost base, while helping it to achieve a more favorable cost-income ratio, especially related to its IT costs.

SocGen turned to interactive smart boards and has employed techniques such as Scrum, Kanban, Sprints, and backlog grooming. It has incorporated practices for value prioritization, unevent release, and fail fast, allowing it to establish a sustainable set-up encompassing all of its worldwide IT teams, including offshore and near-shore centers.

At the same time, it has built and deployed software factories with specific tools from the market or the open-source community, which provide measurement to capture functional usage of its applications, infrastructure, and private cloud. This deployment impacts the application development teams, and involves production IT Infrastructure as well as the business line.

While SocGen has built the necessary capabilities and reached its initial target on more than 30 critical applications, the firm still has ambitions to deploy most of its systems of innovation and differentiation to reach 50 percent of its global investment banking services by mid-2016.

The IT team at SocGen also has an eye on the future. A system known as "desktop scavenging" uses existing resources-employee workstations-during downtimes, such as in the evening, to add capacity to grid processes, while driving down the cost of doing so.

"This is an external prestigious recognition for our efforts and dedication through our Continuous Delivery program," says Carlos Goncalves, global banking and investor solutions global CIO. "This trophy rewards our ambition to become a fully agile department by adopting the Continuous Delivery practices, allowing our businesses to constantly innovate and adapt faster than the competition."

This trophy rewards our ambition to become a fully agile department by adopting the Continuous Delivery practices, allowing our businesses to constantly innovate and adapt faster than the competition. -- Carlos Goncalves