GCP – A smart investment: FINRA builds a culture of improvement with DORA

To protect investors and ensure market integrity, regulatory bodies in the financial sector must operate with exceptional efficiency and foresight. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), which oversees U.S. brokerage firms, is dedicated to advancing its regulatory capabilities to safeguard capital markets and empower confident investing for all. A key aspect of this mission is modernizing its software development lifecycle to adapt to rapid market changes. Facing the challenge of lengthy lead times for production updates, FINRA recognized the need for a transformative approach — one that would provide clear, data-driven insights into its development processes so its teams could work smarter, not just harder.

However, like many large organizations, FINRA faced challenges with lead times in getting new updates and capabilities into production. The organization recognized that the key to transformation was to leverage an AI-enabled, data-driven approach to gain clear insights into their development processes.

This is where the power of Google Cloud’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) program came into play. By adopting this data-first approach to engineering, FINRA is driving a cultural shift toward continuous improvement and building a multi-million-dollar, multi-year business case to fundamentally modernize its testing and deployment capabilities to empower its mission.

Data-driven insights inspire real impact

FINRA’s journey began with a DORA workshop led by Google Cloud. The goal was to understand how to operationalize DORA’s four key capabilities – deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service – to gain a clear, standardized view of performance across all its engineering teams.

The impact of the data-driven insights was immediate. The workshop provided a framework that helped FINRA uncover critical insights, particularly within its Market Regulation Surveillance division. The data revealed that lengthy User Acceptance Testing (UAT) cycles were a significant factor in slowing down lead times.

Armed with this concrete evidence, FINRA was able to build a compelling business case for change. The DORA workshop and Google’s expertise added significant credibility to the proposal, helping to “seal the deal” on a multi-million dollar, multi-year initiative to establish a dedicated sandbox environment. This new environment is designed to dramatically reduce UAT cycle times, allowing FINRA to get critical regulatory updates into production faster than ever before.

Grassroots adoption, enterprise-wide improvement

The decision to standardize on DORA was rolled out enterprise-wide, ensuring that every development team at FINRA uses the same standard of performance. Teams are now empowered to identify their own areas for improvement and commit to actionable goals.

To support this cultural shift, FINRA replicated the DORA workshop content and is conducting internal training to help teams apply the principles to their daily work. Today, 50% of FINRA’s engineering teams are actively using DORA capabilities, with a goal to reach 100% by the end of the year.

For FINRA, this journey is about more than just numbers. It’s about fostering a Kaizen-like mindset of continuous, organization-wide improvement. By providing its teams with the right tools and insights, FINRA is not just optimizing workflows – it’s accelerating its ability to protect the investing public.

FINRA’s story demonstrates how a proven, data-driven approach can unlock new levels of efficiency and mission effectiveness. By leveraging advanced technology and expert guidance, public sector agencies can gain the impactful insights needed to modernize their operations and better serve their constituents.

Want to discover what else AI can do for governments, nonprofits, and other public sector organizations? Register to attend our upcoming Gemini for Government webinar on February 5, where we will dive deeper into the transformative technology powering the next wave of innovation across the public sector.