Rhea Narula: Navigating Solutions Architecture (Senior Architect at Scotiabank Digital)

so welcome podcast today so could you tell us about your educational background career experience and how it got you to where you are today of course yes great question so thank you so much so I started my journey at Wilford laua University and I began with economics and then slowly moved to Communications and I did a minor in uh management and you know I think that with a lot of Education you know comes a lot of really great courses and a lot of teachers pushing you in the right direction but what I found to be

very insightful and something that pushed me into what I'm doing today and even my entrepreneurial side businesses is really the extracurriculars that I was taking on so apart from just the education and just the day-to-day I made sure that I surrounded myself with people who had the same vision as me and what we were able to do is we were able to join a lot of different clubs one of them being woman in leadership Lauer and then another one which was war workers where I was president of these clubs and what I was able to

learn is that you're really able to grasp and meet a lot of different people who can teach you many different skills along the way especially within the business world so you know there's a lot of relevance with going to a good University I completely agree but you know taking the path of doing summer internships if you have any programs that you have that leverage co-ops I would jump to that because there's nothing that's going to teach you more than when you're in it and that sort of application and you know that's going to take you

to the next level and that's going to teach you not just about working with different individuals their different learning styles but also the hard skills so you know with a lot of these internships and even at school you know they give you these Excel spreadsheets but what can you do with them you know what does that look like and so for me I was able to grasp a lot of knowledge by speaking with the right people networking but also moving myself into the direction of you know let me Network and build internships where I can

so that I can actually understand what is digital marketing what is moving different business blocks forward you know that's all business jargon until you're actually in it so regardless of the university and program you take make sure that you have internships and make sure you have just different projects that you're working on so you can grasp that learning as well amazing thank you for sharing that and just followup question on that did you always know what career path you wanted to go down and what was the turning point or Reason for picking the current career

path you are in yeah that's a good question so I don't think I ever knew what career path I wanted to go into I think I always thought I wanted to get into digital marketing and I think that was just the relevance and I always thought building your brand is the biggest most important thing especially as a person who's networking and so I love thinking about brand and I think you know even going into Communications they really sell you on this vision of brand management and I thought that's where I was going to go and

then I actually went to a talk that was hosted by my school and it was about women in leadership and TD Bank they were doing a collaboration and I was speaking to a lot of individuals who were in Enterprise architecture and the thing that sprung me amongst you know the various different career paths was this specific space has a mix of technology and business and you're speaking with a lot of leaders who know both so I thought that this was a good area where I could Excel my learning and then eventually move into where I

want to go which is in product so that's sort of where I want to jump into next and it's all a journey so I wouldn't say you should ever be afraid of taking risks or taking the chance to just jump into something because you never know where it's going to lead you next and so I didn't know and I still don't know and I always worry about oh have I made a right decision but there's so many other areas that actually have convinced me like yes this is a good path for you you've made a

lot of really good connections you like what you're doing and it's always a journey and you're always learning and so that's where I think I should be and that's where you know I'm happy that I took those risks awesome thank you so much for sharing that as well and I know you touched a little bit about in first question but is there anything that you wanted to expand on about how did you think your educational background helped you in the role you are in currently and in which ways yeah definitely I think going to my

specific University it opened a lot of different career paths for me because I felt like there was a lot of opportunity you know like when you're in high school or even when you're in elementary school you know I'm pretty sure you even filled out this sheet and that really explain like oh you know depending on your personality this should be your career path and that career path said that I would be a librarian for example yeah super random I was like there's no way but what I realized is that this educational background can only take

you so far I think I pushed on this early in our conversation but you really need to build your own opportunities and you need to really raise your hand up to make sure that you're not going behind so if there's individuals that you know are showcasing their interest in case studies or if they're showcasing their interest in public speaking you know take those risks learn those skills and that's going to come with knowing the people from your school so I'm happy that I went to my school but I think there's a lot of opportunities even

outside of school especially when it comes to all the resources you have such as you know YouTube LinkedIn learn and I would say that education is important but also internships and co-ops and even being in the job so I'm happy that all those things have really led me into what I'm doing today which is you know spearheading this architecture practice awesome yeah thank you so much for sharing that as well and now we're just going to transition into the role that you have right now and so my next question to you is can you walk

us through the process of building and maintaining the Scotia Bank architecture community website on SharePoint sure yeah so just a you know a little background of of what I do so what I do right now is I try to build a community I think you know my education and communication brings that closeness and tries to Bridge Community Wherever I Go including this architecture practice which you know is not something that you think right away is community building and so for architecture as a practice especially at an Enterprise level it's important to to gauge that you

need the business to be involved and the technology to be involved and so what we've decided as a team is we needed to have you know a place where it's Central so everyone at the bank can access it which was where we thought of SharePoint because that was something that a lot of individuals at the bank today we use it quite frequently and not just that but everyone knows how to use it so we thought it was a good place to store all the important information and now the process of building and maintening this information

I will never stop thinking of digital marketing Wherever I Go including in this role so I like to think that it's very important to maintain high quality just the brand itself of it so I wouldn't say that you look at the site and it's a boring site just that talks about architecture we really tried to Jazz it up and we really Tred to make it interesting so that it tells a story for each page I think that one of the best parts about working with this is working with the vast amount of teams it's not

just on our team but it's teams around Scotia Bank we have a huge presence of lam which is the Latin American side so we like to ensure that it's not just in English but there's also a lot of Spanish components as well and I think you know one of the best parts about this is I'm really allowed to give myself a lot of the creative freedom to not just have like obviously we have a realm of Bank standards which I compli to too but I think it goes deeper than that we need to make sure

that the standards are there but also the relevance of what we're building and trying to make something like a reference architecture diagram or something that where people don't think is necessarily interesting pop out so that they read it and they understand the importance and relevance of what we're doing on a day-to-day awesome thank you for sharing that as well and so my next question to you is what challenges did you face when building and maintaining the SharePoint website and how did you overcome them yeah for sure so I think you know like I mentioned in

the previous question the SharePoint site is a community- based thing so we have different teams all around the bank that use this and so we wanted to make sure that there's accessibility with that and that's where it came with having a few Spanish components but also making sure that it is usable and relevant and so I think one of our biggest challenges was making sure that people kept coming onto the site and they found that relevant detail I think a lot of times people don't understand how important is to just keep going back and forth

to this or sometimes it's difficult to see you know if there's any relevance to this and so that's where I thought that was the biggest challenge so we wanted to make sure that you know there's a lot of marketing to do with it so we have it on different newsletters we make sure that we have something called lunch and learns so that these communication methods are are able to translate to everyone in the bank we really wanted to have the proper training to ensure that everyone's you know able to access everything but also give us

feedback you know you always need to have not just the customer retention but also the understanding of what are people looking at when they're seeing our site and that's with everyone that's with everything when it comes to the the business world so it's good to have that feedback loop and I think from that we're able to really Market our site into something that's pretty decent especially at a bank level site yeah and so what are some common Trends or challenges you've notice in the architecture of projects within the organization and how do you work to

ensure teams move forward while maintaining compliance and security standards right so I think the best answer to that is just ensuring that there's proper training so one of the trends that I've seen is a lot of people like to skip steps sometimes and it's not to do that they don't want to be compliant but I find that there's a lot of business pressure and that's relevant because we're always trying to have a competitive advantage over the other Banks and how can you do that in this space you know it's quite tough and so to keep

that momentum moving I find that you know a lot of these Banks because of the nature of them right it's not just like a small uh startup right I think I've been in both startup and such a big organization and I realized that the turnover on these things is just not as simple you need to have something where you have to follow process and that's due to compliance reason and so what I find is that people like to skip things but it's not their fault it's the fact that we have business pressure they need to

keep moving and so what we do is we try to build a middle ground where they're still being compliant they still follow process and on our side and my biggest challenge is really how to build this efficiency so that they're not going to 10 different groups presenting the same let's say artifact or same template they're just sort of spearheading this and so we were able to get you know a representative from each area and rather than going to 10 different places they're going into one place with 10 Representatives so that everyone's saving the time and

so that's something that I would say that that's how they're really ensuring comping standards is they're talking to the right people all at once rather than going back and forth to different places I see yeah thank you for tapping on to that as well and so my next question for you is building reports to showcase the savings from architecture pattern sounds essential so could you share an example of a report that demonstrated significant time or cost savings for the bank and how was this received by stakeholders so we as a group uh I work on

the governance side so typically what we do is our whole Enterprise architecture as a whole I'll try to get this as quick as possible but our whole job is to make sure that there's efficiencies and that includes building the right patterns so what that means is you know all throughout architecture there needs to be some sort of patterns that are aligned so rather than just using you know everyone in the bank using different hosting methods everyone is actually supposed to be using one specific method so that could be using a SAS product versus building in

house that's one of our biggest strategies and I'm pretty sure you know there's a lot of individuals and a lot of banks that are trying to mimic the same thing and so one of our reports and we send monthly reports and these reports are even translated onto our dashboard which I wish I could show you and essentially you know rather than going into the nitty-gritty of it but what we showcase is how advanced our technology is and how many vendors we were able to take on so that we're not building these inhouse products because that

takes so much time rather than just integrating with these products and these vendors and so I would say like that was maybe one of our biggest reports of last year where we were able to really showcase you know this is a vendor that's able to to help with this strategy rather than having all these individuals from different places build something that is not relevant at all so you know I think in terms of showcasing this I think it's really important to have those monthly reports back to the leaders awesome yeah and how has your role

evolved since transitioning from a process manager to a senior architect and are there any new responsibilities or projects you're particularly excited about or have incurred right yeah so when I first started I started off as a ba which is just you know business analyst I had no idea what Enterprise architecture was you know you can Google Enterprise architecture you can watch YouTube videos but you'll never really understand unless you're in it and so for the past few years I've gone from business analyst to process manager and now as a senior architect and I think the

biggest shift throughout that whole journey was now actually speaking to project teams so the individuals that I'm talking to on a day-to-day basis and helping them with their architecture itself so you know by no means do I find that I'm someone who's an expert at that but I do think that I am a expert on learning about the process and so you know if they need to get money for business funding or if they need any like you've mentioned before any compliance approvals that I feel like I'm the go-to person for that along with managing

the Scotia Bank architecture community site where completely rebranding right now so those are the two big responsibilities that I have and then the third one is actually really owning on this architecture Community you know not necessarily a TED talk but what we're trying to do is we're trying to have more blogs out so that people are you know not just reading it but they're trying to understand what we're doing on a day-to-day basis because all these architecture teams you know we had a lot of movement within the organization recently and I think just building that

streamline and really organizing you know our next few steps and even into the fiscal is really important and that's where I come along and I try to build that alignment so you know this new role is taking on strategy it's taking on branding and most importantly it's still guiding project teams rather than taking a back step on that thank you for sharing that yeah and now we're just going to move on to a different part um for this question and because we know that you have several site businesses on the side so you are wondering

you know what are they and what made you want to start those site businesses yeah so you know I have four right now and I know that's extremely tough but something about me is that I don't sit down um I should I should sit down because I know sometimes it gets overwhelming but I really enjoy Lear learning and if there's a place where I can really enhance my skills that's from doing and so my friend and I we got really into skiing during Co and we went to BC for a few months and that's where

we went to all these different Resorts and we realized that we wanted to send a gift back to all our friends but we couldn't find a good Avenue on what those gifts would be and so we started the shop called ski boming crew and there we sell different candles actually which is extremely random and I completely understand that but what our main goal was not just to you know build these candles or build this brand but it was also to teach us as to individuals who are both in the banking and Consulting space about marketing

and about speaking to different clients about different products because in our day-to-day we talk about services or we talk to different teams but they're mostly internal and so we wanted to look at a different way where we can externally learn about something but also do it in a way that's kind of fun and you have your own freedom to do whatever you want on this site because it's yours you know there's no stakeholders involved it's just your own freedom and you know what I think has been pretty awesome is we've actually been featured in you

know different ski magazines we've had different blogs and so it's been pretty fun to just actually talk about what we are able to accomplish within the the past few months of this and you know we have all the variety of different shops and you know we I wouldn't say we sell out but we have a few popular brands and that's really from doing you know so I would say if you want to do something you'll make time do to do it and that's what we're able to do and I have a really great partner who's

so smart and she you know she works at Amazon right now and we both are trying to understand like customer insights and why people click on one over the other and it's been super rewarding so far so I'm excited to see where that goes and then I also have a Airbnb on the side I know we haven't talked about that but the main reason I wanted to do the airbnbs because I wanted to again I wanted to make sure you know I love to travel I love to explore new places and so I was like

well I can bring that experience home and so I took my condo and I made into an Airbnb and it's been super rewarding I'm just started doing renovations as well to make sure that the customers happy and they have a really amazing space so that's been super fun as well and then finally I have rent Zoro so I know this all sounds kind of crazy but you know there's a lot of time when you make it I think when you start you know really pushing your boundaries of what you can do and working with the

right people you're able to accomplish more than you know so rent Zoro started off as more of a passion projects I've always been really interested in the housing market and you know that's where I sort of acquired my Airbnb as well because I always wanted to be an investor and one of the things I realized with uh short-term versus long-term rentals is when you're looking for a rental and a rental space A lot of times you have to gather these documents from different places and you're getting these documents as a tenant and you you don't

know who you're giving them to and a lot of times it's very private details and and a lot of individuals in the space don't realize that they shouldn't be giving away their SIN number or really explicit information and I realize that not only does it take a long time and it's very time consuming but there must be more efficiencies especially in this realm of Housing and you know there needs to be ways to mitigate this and again I'm a processed person so my friend and I we jumped into this opportunity and we started this company

called rent Zoro which is actually up and running right now so if anyone wants to check it out they totally can and if you have any questions around it be happy to answer any question I can but our goal is to you know prevent any fraudulent documentation but also make the experience and enhance the experience for a customer completely seamless so rather than you Gathering all your documentation understanding oh where do I get my credit report you know where do I get my income documents we streamline that process for you in just a few clicks

and we build this report for you and we screen the tenants but we also screen the property owner landlord so you never feel like you know who am I giving this to you you always feel like there's a safety behind you and so I'm happy that I was able to join that because that taught me a lot about you know the technology that we're using but also again it's about customer experience and enhancing people's lives really awesome and you know it's so inspiring to hear you talk about all your s businesses especially when you're juggling

with a full-time job as well and it's almost like you're you're a superwoman no no no I don't think so but that's amazing to see you know how your passion really drives you and you're actually putting all these ideas into action and I think that is just so inspiring on my end as well yeah and so to wrap things up this is our final question for you what advice do you have for anyone you know young professionals or students coming out of school and looking to start their careers yeah I have so much advice that

I would give to myself if I was doing this again and I I don't want to go on a tangent on this so I'm G to try to make this as seamless as possible but I would say don't expect people to just hand things to you you know it is a work in progress whatever you're doing and there's a lot of times where you think you're making a big mistake and it's the end of the world but it's only a big mistake if you don't learn from them I like to fail really quickly and then

just jump on board again and if it's not something I'm passionate about I'm not going to do well in it I'm not going to do well in it and that's the reason the reason is because you're spending all this time at work or finding a job or you know trying to do something and it's always good to get your first foot in the door so even I had jobs that I didn't think were going to be good for me but there's always learning lessons in there and there's always people that can bring you to the

right places so don't be afraid to ask you know and my mom drills this into my head every single time and she's one of the best people I know and she's super bold with her career and she always tells me that you always start at zero wherever you go so don't be afraid to take these risks don't be afraid to raise your hand you know there's all these stakeholder meetings where I feel like you know even something like this I feel like I'm an impostor syndrome you know just going down my throat but if you

don't try you'll never do and you know I think that goes hand inand with everything I've been able to do so far is if I don't keep going and if I don't keep trying I'll never learn and if I keep telling myself you're going to fail then I will fail but if I keep telling myself that you know you start at zero nobody expects this from you and if they do then do it you know do it well and do it because you want to do it and so hopefully that comes off as some sort

of advice for people but you know if you're looking for your first career and your first um step in the door I know time seem kind of hard with how the job market is but talk to the right people you know build your network you're not going to just get a job by randomly applying unfortunately I wish that's what it was but speak to the right people and don't be afraid to ask them for what you're looking for because you'll be surprised of people's answers and you know if there's anything I can even do on

my side and guide people to the right direction and if it's in banking or if it's something else outside you know I'd be happy to lead that way and give them that push to that direction awesome thank you so much for the advice I think it's really uplifting you know for students or young professionals to hear that well awesome all right so thank you so much R for time and we really appreciate it appreciate that thank you so much it's been super fun