 In this presentation, Kate and Dan will explain why improving the architects skill and experience is key to achieving HSBC's strategic goals. Warm welcome please for Kate and Dan. One end or the other, they each have stairs. It's a big step up otherwise. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Dan. Thank you. Good to you. That's Europe. We can see. Hello everybody. Come on. Hello. You guys just said coffee should be kind of nice and peppy ready for right before lunch. So thank you very much for having us here. Thank you very much for very warm introduction. I am Kate Platinova. I look after technical domain architecture in HSBC. And as you heard, it's quite a full plate that I have with all the core architecture disciplines across the bank. And I'll try not to move my head because Mike is funny. So what we're here to talk to you today about is the architect of the future. And what does it mean? In HSBC, these are composite pictures of our future architects, right? And they are real people. It's not some diversity sort of composite that we made to make ourselves feel better. These are real folks that are involved in our architecture programs where we encourage people to take up a profession of an architect and make a career change or advance their career through the architecture ranks. What this picture really means to me and what it summarizes are three things that we believe very firmly in HSBC. So first of all, historically, it was very difficult to describe what an architect did. And it was even more difficult to describe what separates a good architect from a great one. But when you have an architect present on the team, you have this sense of decisions being made faster, things are going smoother. And when a huge ambiguous problem presents itself, there's somebody to go to and get help and advice and get a move on to actually compress that problem from a huge ambiguous question into a series of deliverables that can be done across the firm. So we believe that whatever architects do and however you describe it, we need more of them. We definitely need to have them reaching across the entire firm and across the banking industry and be present throughout our strategic delivery of our technology world maps. So second thing we believe is that architects are not born, they are made. All of those skills can be learned and we're very, very active in making sure that people are actively encouraged to take up architecture profession. And as architectural leadership, we are very active in defining what that means, defining the core competencies, defining what that architect of the future should possess, what attributes they should have. And then third thing we believe is that we sort of distilled some of the features of those great architects, probably not all of them, but we have a pretty good idea what competencies we're looking for in our architecture contingent. So that's where I'll talk to you in the next few slides. So first of all, again, we're in this rapidly changing technical environment. Continuous learning is no longer an option for us, right? So you can't rely on the skills that I've learned when I was a software developer 20 years ago and ride that into the sunset, right? So we have to keep evolving, keep learning, being curious and making sure that both your technical skills and all the other skills that go along with architecture profession are sharp. So the way we address that in HSBC is through the introduction of Technology Academy. And what we do there is we partner with a lot of the leading content providers like Coursera, like Degree, like LinkedIn Learning, like our friends in CCNC. And what we do is we actually make a custom made training paths for the architecture practice and for engineering practices and for all the other folks across technology. Because there's almost too much content there at the moment. So if you just say, hey, everybody just go and learn, right? Folks get lost. And sometimes they do not focus on the skills that are actually going to help them in their career. So we try to curate some of this content and try to offer learning paths that are appropriate for different levels of seniority and different paths that people take into architecture. So we don't just focus on the online learning. We kind of have a blend of classroom programs and online content being delivered through that unified portal. What we also found with classroom programs is, again, they need to be appropriate for depending on where you are in your career. So we have a program called Leaders as Teachers for the senior levels of architecture. And then we have programs that I mentioned before. The slide that you saw beforehand is an example of our Athena program that is very targeted to women who want to take up an architecture profession. So they might be in engineering at the moment and they want to make that switch and they'll make a switch into solution architecture first and then progress through the ranks. So that's sort of how we cope with all the change that's happening in the world of technology and how we stay current. Second evolution that we see, second shift is the, again, architecture deliverables, if you will, architecture profession used to be quite centered around design committees and toll gates and being quite waterfall along with the way technology projects were delivered. And the world was much smaller back then. I still remember where all your systems in the company could fit on one page of Visio. And there was a slightly happier world. It's not the case anymore, right? So trying to govern from the center through a very rigid process is no longer our reality. So each one of those components of what architects need to do across the landscape is sort of evolving from design committees into peer reviews and making sure we empower people across the organization within the right guardrails to be able to take correct decisions and make those design decisions as they go through their development, as they're going through their delivery of projects without having to sort of run everything by some central architect, right? So we're distributing that responsibility and making sure that, again, we're possible. We automate the guidance to the point where you can check yourself whether you've actually compliant or not, rather than, again, having me come across and mark your homework at the end of the day. So, again, toll gates, like I said, are getting replaced with more guardrails. So the teams understand, especially in DevOps environment, what's within the strategy, what's outside the strategy, what's permissible, what's not. And they can make decisions themselves. And then reviews and approval by some central team of experts is being replaced by trust and verify model, right? So we're giving our DevOps teams across the firm quite a lot of trust. We educate them on, for example, in my area, what does it mean to be secure? What does it mean to comply with cybersecurity requirements as you're doing your application development? And then we make sure that folks are well educated enough, make good decisions, and we verify that they've done so. And then third but very important component is our overall philosophy around architecture in HSBC. So it can be summarized as the three core competencies that we're looking for. So the first one is technical excellence. The second one is communication mastery. And third one is leadership power. Technical excellence is not optional anymore. Again, there was some sort of period of time where you could be an architect with just a few PowerPoint slides and being able to talk pretty. Those days are gone again. So the depth of technical understanding, how everything fits together in the landscape, has to be present. And that's what is sort of back to being one of the fundamental principles. Again, I'm very biased because I run the area that's called technical domains. If you don't understand what infrastructure does or how data flows through the company and what cybersecurity situation is out there, you really don't have a prayer of being credible in that area. So we're making sure that people are very, very deep in their technical understanding and broad as well if they're doing an enterprise architectural. They have to understand the full context of what's happening. Communication mastery is second key. Again, sometimes we over rely on technical excellence being just that. But being able to express your ideas to the rest of the world in the way that people will understand what you're talking about and would resonate is very, very important. Especially in the context of HSBC, we have close to 250,000 colleagues across 66 countries. So if you cannot communicate your ideas to them, then again, you might as well not have them. They will not take up. And then third but very important piece as well is leadership power. So architects do not usually have thousands of people reporting into them directly. You don't have sort of power to make people do things outside of your influencing and your conviction and your leadership expertise. So you have to make sure that you are out there in the front line that you're setting the vision, you're setting the strategy and you're helping people follow that strategy even when things get very tough. Again, sometimes we fall back on relying on governance structures to exhibit that leadership power and that's not correct. Leading means convincing people to follow you even when the going is very, very tough. So all three of those principles were united in one sort of way of thinking and one philosophy. And we call it Zenzhenge, so I'm sure all the Mandarin speakers will correct my pronunciation here. But the idea here is, first of all, HSBC being Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. We have very proud heritage in Asia, so we wanted to honor that. And then secondly, if you are a fan of Kung Fu movies, the inner sanctum of the temple where the scrolls of power are kept and the hero can go to learn some more skills and refresh themselves. That's what it's called. So we thought it was very appropriate to invite our architects to come to the central place of power, to learn, sometimes to rest, to recharge themselves and go back out into the world and exercise these three disciplines. So there are technical excellence, communication mastery and leadership power being brought into one holistic philosophy. So I'll pass over to Dan now and then we'll open for questions, but thank you very much for your touch. Thank you. Thank you, Kate. This works. Good. That one's better. That's good enough. Thank you for having us. Thank you for that talk. I think there's a slider to beyond this. Do we have a clicker? Here it is. I don't know if you have to touch it, maybe. So CC&C has been part of the open group family for almost 20 years, I think. We were pioneers in Tegaf in Asia, in Australia, in India, and we've trained thousands of Tegaf practitioners in what is now seen by a lot of people as an old-fashioned way of working. It's too slow. It takes too long. We get all of these criticisms. But we believe, and I believe that a lot of people in this room believe that, like a lot of things, it has been adapted to its time and it's still adaptable to its time. So you take something like the Tegaf ADM, which people have used in a very slow, careful way, and I've done that. You take months and months and months to do a design and you hand it to some people who do something with it. By that time in today's world, everyone's passed you by. But the principles of that still apply. We had a solution design course, or solution architecture course, rather, in India three years ago, and we were approached by HSBC there and asked, can you help us with our solution architecture direction, this program? But we really don't want that old style, of course, because it's about the old way of working. So we worked with HSBC and we've been through two iterations now and we're about to get into the third iteration. All of the material is the same. All of these things that we talk about in architecture are the same. But what's different is, just as Kate said, the work that the architecture is about has to flow through the organization. DevOps teams can't be just given a spec and say, go and build this. That's what we used to do. And the reason we have things like Lean and Aja and DevOps is that doesn't work very well. It has never worked very well for a lot of the kinds of things that people want. And in today's digital world, it doesn't work even as well as it used to. So what this course is designed to do and what we're trying to help HSBC to achieve is to help people in solution architecture roles to understand what are really enterprise architecture concepts. And the course takes them through six days. First we talk about context, take them on a journey. And the people in the room, in the courses we've been in, with only a couple of exceptions will not have seen this material before. They're not enterprise architects today. And they're not going to be enterprise architects when they're finished, but we are trying to make sure they're much better solution architects. We take them to an exercise with a fictitious company and say, here's a fictitious company. It has these M&A things going on. It has this technology landscape. It has these business objectives. And let's talk about the work you're familiar with making software. But put it in the context of what are we going to do to help this company be successful. Context, what is the top-down strategy of your company? If you ask a lot of people enterprise today, enterprise IT today, a lot of them can't answer that. What do your customers want? And if the answer from the infrastructure team is, my customer is the development team, then no. Your customer is that person, that consumer at the other end of the chain buying your product, engaging with you. And it's also increasingly your partners in your whole ecosystem. So we need to know about these things, not just in the enterprise architecture tower, but right through the whole value chain of creating value in IT. So we want people in solution architecture who are in the trenches actually designing things to understand that. We also want them to understand that innovation can come from their team and there are ways to do that. We want them to understand what their capabilities are of their team and as was mentioned earlier, the team of teams. And then we take them through a series of exercises, layer upon layer of design choices. Talking about design patterns, which is a new thing, but essential to architecture. People can understand this. They say, ah, I get it, most of them get it. Talking about understanding technology trends. Somebody mentioned Java earlier. Well, there are a lot of Java programmers, but there are other things out there. What about blockchain? What about cloud? What about big data? People working in silos don't often understand these things very well. And they need to know a minimum amount of information about these key technologies in order to make the right design choices in their team. We're talking to them about what the impact of the choices would be and the exercises continue to build a workshop in enterprise architecture so that after six days, they're able to, as Kate said, communicate. And the communication is based on, in the classroom, a toolkit of architecture methods, of a set of artifacts that we build that add layers as we go down the path of creating this technology. And in the end, we have a common semantics to talk about, here is the enterprise architecture for our little imaginary company. It's not fully formed, but actually, by learning how to go through that series of choices, learning to understand what architecture choice and advice and design is about at a high level, it helps the people in those teams to go back to work and think in a different way. That's really what we're trying to do across the patch. We've taught this course in India, in China, in Mexico, in the UK. The audience in the classroom is very different in each one of these contexts. And the other challenge, which maybe Kate would like to talk more about, but certainly we see it, the classroom in China is very different from the classroom in Sheffield, but we want to give everyone the same level set. We want to give everyone the same set of tools and ways of thinking. So we're still iterating on how the training works to make that more successful. That's a key challenge everywhere in the learning development industry. For big corporates who have teams all over the world, we had the same problem when I was at Walmart. How do we align the team in India to the team in Mexico to the team in Arkansas? This is a problem that a lot of people have. So we're very, very happy that HSBC has helped us move our solution architecture course into the modern world much more than it was, and we're happy to be helping them with that. There might be another slide. Maybe not. Yes, there is. So next slide, button. Too many. And just for information, although this is the list of things that were deemed most essential, they're not the only things that you might talk about. The first half of the course is about understanding the basic way of thinking as an architect, and the second half is adding these layers. What security patterns do we have to think about? Because that's underlies and cross-cuts everything as we know. What do we do with APIs and microservices when we are in this world of cloud and mobile and distributed? The banks used to be fortresses where systems were designed. I was in the insurance industry, it was the same. Our systems were designed so that you couldn't get to them, so that nothing could be exposed, and suddenly, over the last 20 years, it's required that we expose a lot of that data. How do we structure our applications? How do we structure our data so that we can be accessed in the right ways but still be secure? What decisions do we make about whether to put things in the cloud or what things to put in the cloud? What are the issues around migration? Because as we're doing, some of this is new, but a lot of it is migrating off the old legacy monolithic systems. How do you do that? What are the main things you need to think about for that to work? How do we think about mobile? Here's my bank branch. How does that work? If you're developing software somewhere in HSBC, probably every end user of most of that software is going to be looking at it on an iPhone, and the underlying basic architecture of how to do that violates a lot of the traditional principles of writing software for a bank. What do we do about that? Plus, things like latency and different experiences. And finally, what do we do about data? We were talking at breakfast about data architecture and DBAs and those jobs, and that was resonating in the first presentation about the people who are going to be rendered useless. And the discussion we were having was about, how does that happen today? Because in the old way of doing things, I've been in this position, I know what I want to do. I'm already, I send my stuff over to the DBA. And I wait. I wait some more. After a while, they come back to me with some stuff. And then we can do a little burn work and we send it back to the data people and they think, this is where the robots are today. So everything about data is different. Data was always your real asset, but everyone needs to know that now in a way they didn't need to know it before. So we try to help people understand that. Over the course of six days, it's possible to see people who come in with skills like business analyst or developer or something like that, security analyst, network person, understand this flow of thinking from topic to topic to topic and how do we apply these layers of technological understanding to dealing with constructing a solution at the enterprise architecture level. We're not talking about tools. We're talking about what is the structure of the thing we need to do. It's really gratifying to see how that actually works in practice with people who haven't done this before. And I believe, I don't have the evidence, you might have the evidence, that they go away able to apply that right away and to make different decisions in design and produce different and better results through the bank. So that's what we're trying to do. I'm very happy to be working with HSBC and that's us done except for questions. Thank you, Dan. We do have some questions coming in and I promise I did not plant the first one. I might come across as though I might have done but I didn't because it's about an open group certification program. The open professions program and specifically the open certified architect side of that. And the question is, has HSBC looked at or considered the open professions program as part of its academy? You haven't planted it. Yes, we have. So we have a fair few architects across HSBC who hold various certifications including TOGAP and many, many, many others because architects do like to learn. That's a good thing. We have made it an official part so I think we're still figuring out our exact set of credentials that puts you in that architecture profession in HSBC so it is a journey. The way we are looking at different levels of architects I think that's one of the things that stabilized over the course of this year is we definitely now have four very specific designations so solution architects that Dan talked about so either folks that are already doing solution architecture in the pods but we want to make sure that they're all consistent in how they do it and they have the same tools in the same language. Then we have platform and portfolio architects. So platform architects look after technical platforms as it says on the tin and portfolio architects are slightly more mysterious but not really. They look after large programs of work. So when you have a number of solution architects of different designations but for example, Basel 3 reform, right, so it's a very large program of work that really needs to be considered holistically so a portfolio architect does that. Then we have enterprise architects. So my group is a good example of enterprise architecture group where we have to think about cybersecurity or data across the entire enterprise and as we continue with those paths I think the relevant certifications and how you progress will emerge and will continue to evolve. Thank you. Now I will give a plug and that wasn't me but I will give a plug. There may be useful information in the materials there that help with the criteria and what it means because at least in terms of what some other organizations are doing. So great to hear you're considering it. You mentioned that architects aren't born, they are made. It's the next question. Their skills can be developed. Are there any traits that successful architects must have and have you at this point been able to identify any backgrounds that people come from that tend to lend themselves to the discipline? I choose to start from what you see in the classroom and then I'll add to it because yes, it's a fast. That's an interesting question because I don't completely agree that they aren't born. I think there is a personality type that works as an architect and there are personality types that don't work as an architect. So if you are the sort of person who always requires an emergency or you're unhappy then you might not want to be an architect and there are people like that but in general architecture can be learned but you do have to have an open mind. You have to have a sort of a systems way of thinking about things and you have to be interested in putting new patterns together but also in reusing and learning about other patterns and you have to be someone who is always learning. So if those aren't interesting to you then you should probably do something else, I think. So to add to that, yes, you do need to have a certain personality type so you have to be a glutton for punishment to be an architect. The overall traits we identify is you have to be brave. So that's what I always say in interviews, are you brave enough and the bigger the company and the higher up in the architecture hierarchy you go the more brave you have to be. So exercise your bravery at solution architecture level and then move on to influencing the technical agenda of companies the size of HSBC where you need to have a very brave outlook and very optimistic outlook and quite resilient sort of way about you. So the backgrounds that we've seen with folks being successful in architecture is very traditionally so application development so software engineering is a very traditional path into architecture so you do design on a number of systems and then eventually you become an architect and you kind of look after bigger patches. But I've also had folks from the business side come and join and then really learn the technical bit because that would be the piece of the competency from the three competencies that I've described that they would be missing so applying themselves to really learning the depth of technology to become credible. I had a lot of folks from infrastructure background and making a shift into for example cyber security or even data so our acting chief data architect actually comes from a very deep infrastructure background and had to have some encouragement along the way that you can learn new skills. So it's that flexibility and that open mind that Dan mentioned I think is the key attributes. On the more official side so we've grouped the traits into the three components that I described and we also have 13 leadership behaviors that in HSBC we believe all architects must exhibit and must work on. I'll plug my boss's blog on LinkedIn. David Knott, check him out. He had a very good blog about those 13 leadership behaviors. Thank you. And now to Andrew and our certification team we need a bravery credential to be added to our list. Yeah, are there technical excellence you stress the importance of Kate? Do you tend to seek a subject matter expert or a technology agnostic architect? That's an interesting one, technology agnostic architect, what's that? So I think you have to be excellent at at least a couple of topics, right? So you don't need to know everything about all the technologies out there it's not possible and then it's just the world's changing too fast but you have to have quite deep background in something. So if we talk about business architecture for example you need to understand how the business is working, right? Otherwise you're not really all that useful when you come to formulate a strategy. That to me is the technical excellence, right? So whatever your chosen bit of technology or company landscape is have deep knowledge in how something works to enough degree of detail to be very credible. And then you have to have that ecosystem thinking about outlook, again that was very eloquent to say if you are in the technology field right now in technology profession and you don't understand how public cloud works you should hang up your boots, right? And if you're not interested or go learn those trends are no longer optional to understand. So you need to know something deeply but also understand the broader context as to where we're going. We refer to it as T-shaped people sometimes in our world. So we are out of time but I'm going to squeeze this one in. Do you have a target architecture for your entire enterprise in order for you to identify the internal capabilities necessary for architects? Just had this image of us locking ourselves in the tower like Dan said and you know taken a couple years. All jokes aside we do, right? So we have a few, we don't have one target architecture that everybody's moving towards but for every area we have, you know in my side of things for example we have the reference architectures to describe what a perfect state of data for example would look like based on the current technologies, right? So what are the things that need to happen with all the data in HSBC for it to be a very well managed business enabling landscape and then the entire architecture is very, very modular so it's not one great big sort of monolith. It's the modules that we can then swap in and out and consider how it applies in the cloud environments and so on and so forth. So yes we have a degree of that but it's not sort of this one picture that was created in the lab. All right we will, well one final one. There's a smiley face at the end of it but somebody's asking for a reason. Are there any architect jobs going at HSBC? Yes, lots. I thought that might be the answer. Yes, there are. So please reach out. We're very again open to Lincoln's and LinkedIn send your interest and yeah, absolutely. Kate, Dan, thank you both very, very much.