Bank of Canada invests in cloud, builds complementary staff upskilling with Microsoft Learn

Planning for next-generation Bank of Canada

The Bank of Canada isn’t your neighborhood bank; as its name suggests, it’s everyone’s bank—it’s Canada’s bank. As such, it doesn’t have any ATMs, and it doesn’t issue car loans or credit cards. It has even greater responsibilities, among them setting monetary policy, distributing currency, and in general maintaining the country’s financial stability, all captured in its stated mission, “To regulate credit and currency in the best interests of the economic life of the nation.” It takes a fair amount of computing resources to support the various business functions in pursuit of that goal, and the role of the bank’s IT department is correspondingly crucial to day-to-day operations. 

Although most IT resources remained on-premises, IT specialists at the bank recognized that the cloud was key to their organization’s future development. They gained executive approval for a nine-year migration plan that places transformed IT operations at the heart of a new hybrid, services-oriented environment built on Microsoft Azure. That environment will take the bank into the future, supporting a broader mission: to develop the next-generation digital Bank of Canada. 

Building success with a smarter organization

The bank decided that it was important to develop and maintain within the organization the skills required to realize that mission. “You can either buy, borrow, or build the skills to bring about such a transformation, and the Bank believes in taking control, building up the internal knowledge, and upskilling our own staff,” says Cloud Infrastructure Product Manager Robert Fauser. Using new technologies, adapting to new ways of working, and designing and operating new digital products and services all require new skills. It’s a journey that’s brought change and opportunity for everyone across the organization, whether involved in providing or consuming IT services. And that journey began with establishing a Cloud Centre of Excellence that would help assess available technology, identify opportunities, and accelerate cloud adoption across the bank’s operations. 

The bank has built an iterative cycle of innovation: gather requirements, develop solutions, then deploy, provide training, and operate the new infrastructure. An agile DevOps research, development, and delivery environment is accelerating Azure adoption. It’s an impressive story of an IT organization taking responsibility for leading its company’s digital transformation, and the bank’s self-directed journey is by now well underway. The bank uses cloud-based development resources built around Azure Data Lake, and has already produced a cloud-first enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for the HR organization. Migration of key operations to the cloud and the introduction of hybrid work practices have also helped maintain business continuity and continue to move the transformation forward amidst the challenges brought by COVID-19. 

Senior Director of IT Services Hajer Zaiem is justifiably proud of progress to date. “We invested in our own people and the return on that investment is a highly skilled and creative workforce, empowered with the digital skills it needs.” 

Moving forward with the velocity of the cloud

An ongoing training initiative identifies critical immediate and emerging skills and integrates related upskilling into an online learning experience platform. “The learning experience platform enables us to identify and provide very targeted learning journeys, skills pathways from which teams and individuals can choose their own adventure,” says Claude Guimont, Senior Learning Specialist. “And a lot of the content there is from Microsoft Learn.” 

The addition of Microsoft Learn training modules supports users as their workflows migrate to the cloud environment, and as staff of all specializations benefit from the opportunities Azure provides. Infrastructure and Operations Director Robin Bradbury says it helps workers take best advantage of key cloud benefits: powerful resources, on-demand elasticity, and low administrative overhead. And the IT department, too, is learning new skills to capitalize on what he calls “the velocity of the cloud.” It’s a change of mindset, Bradbury says. ”We in IT have transformed how we deliver value to the business, evolving from a project shop to a product shop. The bank needs continuous delivery and continuous value from us, and the training Microsoft Learn provides helps us fulfill that need.” 

Bringing Microsoft onboard for the journey

Guimont and his team worked closely with Microsoft to find opportunities to incorporate an ideal mix of online on-demand and instructor-led content that would best fit the bank’s transformation effort. He says, “Working with the Microsoft Learn team, we identified and refined that content to build self-paced modules starting with fundamentals all the way through to certification, if that’s what the learner wants.” It’s important to provide staff with the means to pursue both highly focused task-specific training and topics of less targeted, more general interest that may lead to future opportunities. Some teams use the learning materials to support specific performance objectives, with required training that is highly targeted to mandatory skills. The platform also has modules supporting fundamental security and compliance training that are critical to operating in emerging digital environments. “There’s a lot of flexibility in the material provided by Microsoft to make a broad variety of journeys available on our learning experience platform, not just specialists but anybody who wants to build an understanding of technology even if they’re not directly involved with IT,” Guimont adds. 

The bank’s learning experience platform provides a map to support learners’ journeys, comprising a network of routes through available content, offering both more conventional and less traveled pathways. A key principle is flexibility, says Bradbury. Conventional instructor-led prepackaged classes may not provide the relevance and pace that learners may be looking for. “We used to hear a lot of complaints about the value of instructor-led training at outside facilities. I’ve heard much better feedback on our internal online learning. Less wasted time and energy. Staff say they get a lot more knowledge out of the same amount of time,” says Bradbury.  

IT driving the business forward

Another important advantage, Bradbury says, is that the bank has evolved from an organization of siloed teams with partitioned specialisms and pigeonholed roles into today’s much smarter, more dynamic operation with a broader awareness of the business among all employees. The opportunity for growth provided by the learning platform, he says, “seems to really motivate people to build much more diverse organizations at the working level. We’ve built multidisciplinary teams where people can diversify their knowledge and branch out. They might be experts in networking or network security, for example, but they’re now stretching into automation, or data resilience, or risk management, these types of areas where the bank needs homegrown expertise. They wouldn’t have had that kind of flexibility before.” 

Bradbury re-emphasizes cloud-first IT as a key component in the Bank of Canada’s digital future. He lists some initiatives currently underway: big data driving new business insights, AI, and machine learning; new operational capabilities, digital products, and services—all developed internally and helping drive the digital bank initiative forward. But he says, “Tapping into new services and exposing a new technology like Azure is only half the equation. Microsoft Learn is a fundamental part of a critical complementary learning strategy that helps us provide the opportunities and satisfy the demands of our transformed business.” 

Find out more about the Bank of Canada on LinkedIn.