Kathy Gibson reports from SAP Connect in Kyalami – Standard Bank is working with SAP to build a resilient and adaptable business.
Vanessa Padiachee, executive: group CIO for corporate functions at Standard Bank Group, explains that the finance organisation was at a crossroads back in 2022.
“We had to remediate for an end of life, end of support problem, and we also had a unique business problem we needed to solve for.”
Since then, the organisation has successfully migrated group reporting and the ledgers, and has completed two successful month-ends, she says.
Padiachee points out that technology is changing at such a rapid pace it is hard for organisations to keep up.
“Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting business, and it’s no longer around experimentation and productive use cases. We are looking at enterprise-scale cases for real business value.”
The big challenges in this scenario she says, are the workforce, the data and cybersecurity.
But central to any change, she adds, is to retain a business agenda regardless of how hard it is.
“Technology is hard, but the hardest part of change is the soft side,” Padiachee says.
In her particular project, it took months to get to the point of deciding to migrate to SAP Rise. Having decided to go forward, the first order of priority was to bring the various teams together.
“It’s not just about you and your internal teams. There are a number of stakeholders. And it is a long journey, so you have to ensure you keep people calm during the turbulence.”
Although there were not many role changes, Padiachee explains that there was a lot of rethinking about how work was executed. “With the new platforms, teams have the opportunity to solve things differently.”
Padiachee’s team built a foundation upon which business processes could be optimised. “So we partnered with the business to redesign the data processes. And reshaping the processes meant changing the governance and reporting.”
Getting people to change old habits means reinforcing that they had the ability to be more agile and more efficient, layering more functionality with AI.
Padiachee had to balance complexity, with business, regulation and customers on one side, and a technology platform on the other.
“These competing priorities were a challenge,” she says. “But I believe you have to understand where you are now and where you want to go.
“I am a great believer in architecture: that builds a roadmap about how you want to transform. You can unpack the roadmap and incrementally deliver against it.
“My vision, from a Standard Bank perspective, is that we have a roadmap and we are now layering on the next pieces of technology.”
Innovation is key, and it’s important to allow teams to innovate, Padiachee adds. “This keeps them inspired and motivated, and lets them hone their own skills.
“But it needs to be in a controlled environment, partnering with vendors, keeping governance and guardrails in place, and safeguarding the data. This allows for agility.”
Innovations then need to be brought back into the mainstream systems, again with guardrails, in a controlled and reviewed manner.
What was the main leadership learning that Padiachee has taken away from the migration?
“Partnership was key for me,” she says. “It was important to build the right partnerships with all the stakeholders.”
Leaders should also recognise that the project won’t always go to plan. “It’s OK if the project is red,” Padiachee says. “This highlights issues and provides the focus to unpack and resolve those issues.”
She advises that this environment allows teams to give constructive feedback. “And you can’t just stand aside and watch the project – sometimes you have to get your hands dirty to help solve a problem.”
A key to the migration’s success was understanding the roles of IT and business.
“We led with a technology problem,” Padiachee says. “That was the highest priority because we were facing end of life and support. We then partnered with business to optimise on that.”
Dealing with rapid change needs to be built into any project, she adds. “Have a clear strategy and roadmap, and review that roadmap every six months. Things change so quickly, you may need to pivot along the way.”
Sponsorship is critical for project success, she points out. “If you start this journey, you need to ensure you have sponsorship from the right executives.”
A big migration goes beyond technology and business: if organisations don’t embed culture from the beginning, the project can stall.
“We laid out key roles for IT and business,” Padiachee explains. “We had to bring the entire finance team with us, so business took the lead.
“You can deliver the best technology, but if you don’t have right culture you will fail. And you can’t bring people in at the end – they have to be on board from the onset.”
Part of the change management was training, which is an continual process, and onboarding.
If it continues on the path of its current vision, Padiachee believes that Standard Bank will be a future-ready organisation, transformed, and running the best AI-enabled and autonomous finance technology.
She concludes with some key takeaways from her experience in migrating to Rise:
- Start with a business case and ensure solid back-up all the way to the board
- Be very clear what problem you need to solve. You can’t solve everything, so start small then build from there
- Sponsorship is important
- Build partnerships – and don’t be afraid to have the tough conversations
- Strong governance is important
- The role between technology and business is critical, with a solid view of what each does
- Ensure that, at end of the programme, you can go back to the business case and check that you did deliver.