Looking at other industries to think about innovation and how to leverage technology in wealth management is always interesting. In that context,
the digital transformation journey of the Washington Post led by Shailesh Prakash is very insightful.
They quickly recognized that The Post needed to achieve excellence in both journalism and technology. It was a radical transformation, moving the IT department from an IT system babysitting mindset, IT systems in which the newsroom staff had very little confidence, to a product development mindset, building and inventing digital products. Part of the journey was adopting agile and colocating the engineers with their partners from the newsroom. They decided to build versus buy, set a fast experiment and innovation culture, and developed an obsession with products. Attracting and retaining the best engineers was key in that journey.
Through their excellence in technology, they built a set of tools they could sell to other publishers: Arc Publishing (Arc XP) was born, generating tens of millions of dollars of revenues for The Post.
Deep dive into the digital transformation of the Washington Post with the University of Virginia case study. There are also plenty of resources on the web. Just search for Shailesh Prakash (who is now at Google). If you like this digital journey, I also recommend reading the Goldman Sach’s Digital Journey case study from Harvard Business School. A great read.
Digital Transformation of Asset Managers and Wealth Managers 