An Empirical Analysis of Cloud, Mobile, Social and Green Computing: Financial Services IT Strategy and Enterprise Architecture

Financial services organisations have shown a significant interest in the adoption of emerging cloud, mobile, social networks and green computing environments for managing the needs of their complex business processes and systems. How will these emerging technologies affect and be embraced by financial services organizations in practice? This paper presents empirical exploratory research on the applicability of emerging cloud, mobile, social and green technologies in these organizations. We investigate how these emerging technologies will affect the IT strategy and enterprise architecture of the financial services organisations by analyzing recent interviews of fifteen senior technology executives and CIOs from this sector. The outcomes of this study suggest that the sector perceives these emerging technologies both as a challenge and opportunity for their businesses. In order to meet their business objectives they do, however, require a phased, systematic, people-oriented, business-focused and low risk approach that combines both business and technology impacts to the assessment, selection, consolidation and adoption of these technologies for specific business services without putting their customers´ information at risk.