It was a pleasure to have been part of the tremendous team effort over the last few years and having helped driving upsides, which are shown in the Annual Report 2016 of Standard Chartered.

Initiatives like an aggressive API Strategy, the Hadoop and Machine Learning ecosystems driving massive upsides for the business (Very proud to have acted on Hadoop over 3 years ago), agile architectures to power charge channels, RegTech and overall dramatic innovation in the technology environment.

Equally, I am happy to see in the hints in the Annual Report, that quite a few of the initiatives I have been part of kicking off will continue and be expanded in years to come.

Good news!
While reading through the annual report, I was missing more insights of the Group CIO’s visions, views, achievements, and core future initiatives. The state of technical affairs, teams, and investments.
How can shareholders evaluate whether the investments in the bank are worthwhile, if they can’t measure the Technology quality?

Especially in the Banking sector, but also Telecommunciations or Retail, this is the one of the most important true differentiators in today’s world. Looking at many local banks nowadays, they just aren’t able to cope without massive external help! Standard Chartered (as other global players in banking and outside) are having a massively large Technology Organization.

So how are they doing? Do they have talent? Are the delivery at innovation at speed? Is the bank attracting more talent (a sign of great technology teams)?
Investors must asked these questions and Corporations need to share, even in the Annual Report! How digitally and technically ready these are! Scorecards are more than finances, they need to show the investment into the future of the organization and in the digital world!

When I look at Corporations Annual Report, what would I like to see?

1.) The mix of modern versus old technologies, as a sign of capabilities

2.) Outsourced versus Insourced technology capabilities, confirming the abilities to change and innovate

3.) Adoption rate of agility and areas agile methods are being used – Smart Architecture and empowerment of agile teams allow corporations to rapidly create new products and services.

4.) Adoption of Innovation for Technologies and teaming with Startups, this includes the usage of Open Source frameworks – a sign of deeper technology skills

5.) Discretionary versus Non Discreationary cost (Must spend to keep the place going vs budget to drive new projects), shows quality of IT and ability to develop new products and services day by day

6.) Annual achievements in modernizing and simplifying technologies (measuring the transformation journey itself)

7.) Future investment in type, technology, and style

I hope organization will adopt some form of CIO/CTO Scorecard in their annual reviews and also sharing how they invest into changing corporations, so that shareholders can better evaluate the rate of transformation in cororpations.