DBS’ IT Spend: 85 Percent Outsourced to 85 In-House
In 10 years, DBS has managed to profoundly transform its IT culture with IT spending shifting from 85 percent outsourced to 85 percent in-house.
According to the bank’s chief data and transformation officer, Paul Cobban, the key to this achievement is from close collaboration with its human resources department and stresses the key element is about exactly the expertise of this environment: people.
«We’ve been lucky that we’ve had such a great relationship with our HR team on a number of counts,» said Cobban.
«Clearly, transformation is about the people – and it surprises me how often people don’t get that. So the HR team has been very progressive in their thinking, and in reinforcing that culture of change throughout the bank.»
Traditional Training Doesn’t Work
Cobban highlights that a critical part of the transformational journey is about encouraging new behavior, stressing that conventional learning methods do not yield results.
«If you think, for example, about the amount of learning that it takes to take a company from being very analogue – as we were – to taking much greater advantage of the digital world, you’ll see what a gigantic cultural change has been involved,» he explained, in a report with «HRM Asia».
«If you take a traditional training approach, you’ll never get there. Instead, we’ve worked with our HR counterparts on creating a whole series – literally hundreds – of different experiments aimed at trying to find out how people like to learn and what’s most effective.»
And it is precisely this effective change in mindset that has the power to charge adoption rates and empower internal IT talent.
«If you want to be a digital company, you’ve got to take control of your intellectual property; you need to hire the very best engineers, and if you take the traditional approaches, it’s slow and ineffective,» referring to the more than three-fold transition from outsourcing to insourcing IT capabilities.
