What does it take to develop and implement transformational technology? Quite a lot. Resources, vision, investment and expertise to name a few. For SS&C, our Lyric journey began with a well-designed plan focused on the fundamentals: understanding the business and marketplace needs, alignment between tech priorities and business needs throughout the process, and delivering on outcomes.
Lyric: Setting a Course for Development
Start with the need, focus on the outcomes
We first assessed the current business environment and future needs of the market. This exercise was critical. It allowed us to identify the business needs we were solving for and the outcomes to deliver. When the focus is solely on technology, the priority becomes the build-out of the application versus enabling business outcomes. Disconnects inevitably crop up. The ability to achieve sustainable outcomes shrinks.
Questions we examined included where we were, where the market is, and what the market is driving toward in terms of future products, services and solutions. The marketplace challenges and business needs that rose to the forefront in our SWOT analysis included:
- Technology innovation and acceleration: driving the need for a more agile, open architecture technology stack.
- New products and service expectations: evolving rapidly and driven by investor demands.
- Sophisticated management and insight tools to harness data: organizations challenged with enterprise-level data management while simultaneously securing data and fraud mitigation.
- Globalization of operating models: need for a flexible ecosystem to support the functionality the marketplace requires and connectivity with global markets.
Execution: How We Approached It
Collaboration and alignment
With a project of this complexity and scale, collaboration and alignment between the business and IT was a must. We formed a cross-functional, globally-resourced team. The team focused on use cases, looking at the lines of business and types of products SS&C services and how to bring those capabilities into our new solution. This approach enabled the business to better understand the technology being developed. IT better understood the problems the technology needed to solve.
Our cross-functional design approach helped ensure that we architected at the appropriate level. Most importantly, it enabled us to address the highest tech priorities and business outcomes to deliver.
Agility played a prominent role in our execution and Lyric’s architecture. Defining and enhancing in rapid iteration allowed us to continuously improve and ultimately helped accelerate development. Global, cloud-native microservices—core to Lyric’s architecture—support flexible use and a quicker software development cycle. This enables SS&C to continuously design, develop and deploy new applications and services that address our clients’ future outcomes and the future needs of investors and the marketplace.
Other components of our architecture include:
- Open Source Technology Stack
- SS&C Private Cloud
- Cloud Data Lake
- Native Serverless Microservices
- Distributed Event Store
As Lyric rolls out to our clients and the marketplace, we’ve adopted a componentization approach to implementation. This minimizes the impact to day-to-day operations and allows us to deliver value quickly while monitoring and managing risk. We’re also collaborating with existing clients to incorporate their requirements.
Developing transformational technology can be a game-changer for the marketplace. To get there, however, requires governance, strategic planning and the alignment of tech priorities to business needs. For SS&C, it started with a clear view of the business needs we were solving for and delivering on those outcomes.
To learn more about our approach and development of Lyric, we invite you to listen to our Lyric in Action podcast.
