2019 AWARD FINALIST SPOTLIGHT: Bank of America - Finalist in the Operational Excellence to deliver Digital Transformation Category

Read this article about Bank of America, one of our finalists, in the category Best Achievement in Operational Excellence to deliver Digital Transformation, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2019 Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program. Click here to read articles on other finalists.

The Chief Technology Organization is responsible for supporting Bank of America’s technology including over 5,700 applications, 160,000 servers, 1.33 MM network ports, 16,000 ATMs, 36 MM digital and 25.9 MM active mobile banking users.  The stability of Bank of America’s systems is critical to our global operation and maintaining our customers’ trust.

Technology operations plays a significant role in enabling responsible growth and driving operational efficiency throughout the organization. A program was launched almost two years ago to focus on these areas with the key objectives being:

• Build an operating model that optimizes structure
• Reduce the volume and duration of technology incidents
• Return productive capacity to the organization by increasing automation
• Reduce the cost of operating Bank of America’s technology

The program was charted and kicked off a with a “100 Day Sprint” to establish a set of quick wins to set the course for improving operational efficiency and enabling Bank of America’s digital transformation. Fifty key operations leaders and practitioners from across the organization met at an off-site location, removed from day-to-day distractions, to focus on operational efficiency.  After two intense days the team walked away with a set of recommendations to implement over the course of the next 100 days which included:

• Creating an intelligent alert platform that dramatically reduced the number of alerts generated by systems, resulting in less response time.
• Building an automated self-healing platform directly integrated with the technology event management platform and incident management system of record to ensure immediate action could be taken to fix issues without requiring human intervention.
• Dedicating additional people to investigate the root cause of our incidents and take steps to prevent recurrence, reducing duplicative work.
• Accelerating our adoption of the private cloud to reduce the number of incidents as compared to our legacy platforms.

To consolidate Infrastructure operations 2,800 teammates across 15 teams, including server, storage, database, middleware, mainframe and network environments, were brought into a single organization. A horizontal, enterprise-wide Application Production Services capability was created to improve operating efficiency and meet business service level requirements.  Over 5,000 people globally were identified who would move out of their vertical organizations and come together to form a horizontal function.  This resulted in the formation of a single organization responsible for the operation of Bank of America’s technology—infrastructure and applications. 


Core agile principles were applied to technology operations transformation to accelerate delivery and provide the flexibility required to enable long-term sustainable transformation. A selected set of “stories” or improvements to develop and then implement every two weeks. 

As a result of this program the number of high priority technology incidents has reduced by 93%.  The average duration of an incident was reduced by nearly half, with over 40% resolved in mere seconds through automation. The team reset the bar for what operational efficiency looks like and did so while simultaneously taking out over $16.5 MM in annual operating expense.