Role and importance of BPM in Human Resources (11/22/2011)
(...) For any manager, this could result in detailed and graphic reports which may offer clear pictures, and also the solution would also help in the approval and escalation aspects. Can say for certain that all of the processes that are associated with recruiting could be directly or indirectly affected by the way a persons resources department functions. A persons resources department can particularly benefit by the implementation of the good business process management solution for a number of reasons, for example knowing that many existing recruiting processes are paper based; that solutions often require cross departmental collaboration; that time is usually a crucial factor; that multiple levels might be involved in the making decisions process; and that the processes need to be adaptable to alter. (...)

Creating a BPM solution versus buying one (10/20/2011)
(...) Besides, with several BPM solution providers providing relevant solutions, seeking to develop a BPM solution on your own while attempting to concentrate on your core competencies would only produce further complications. A substantial quantity of businesses that take a look at building their very own BPM solutions are the ones that are in the technological sphere themselves, which is basically simply because they often believe that they're in the know-how of creating effective solutions. The successful implementation of the BPM solution, in such scenarios, depends not only on the existing technical capabilities of these involved, but additionally of the capability to adjust to the ever changing BPM sphere. (...)

Benefits of remote IT support for businesses (10/17/2011)
(...) This is a take a look at some of the benefits to presenting remote computer support for your business needs. Fast results One of the advantages of choosing computer support that is looked after from the remote location is that it will help to offer you fast results. This kind of support utilizes a remote desktop connection, allowing technicians to simply access the computers or networks, even from the remote location. (...)

The importance of CRM to a business owner (10/01/2011)
(...) Once the call is answered decision concerning moment occurs. If they're placed on contain the patience level doesn't go much beyond one minute. So your phone system should permit the caller to get towards the department they need quickly. (...)

New and better ways to conduct business communication (10/01/2011)
(...) A person in Toronto who would like to reach their sales person immediately might cancel a purchase if she's in Cleveland and hasn't answered her email. The customer world is one of instant gratification. You cannot enhance the company's main point here if productivity is down. (...)

What exactly does disruptive innovation mean (01/18/2010)
(...) For instance, Intel introduced the low-end Celeron processor within a separate business division in direct response to The Innovators Dilemma; e-Bay, itself a disruptor, not surprisingly, has a senior director of Platform and Disruptive Innovation. The theory of disruptive innovation is one of the few business theories in which scientific deduction has been used to identify the causal mechanism underpinning success. Most business theories take the examples of a few successful businesses, identify a few common traits and then recommend that all businesses adopt those traits - without identifying the circumstances in which, or the reasons why, those traits were associated with success. (...)

Disruptive innovation is all about understanding three issues (01/18/2010)
(...) Each can be used in either a sustaining or disruptive way. Equally, in financial services, GlobeTax's development of V-STP is a business model founded on a unique combination of standards, outsourcing, networks and messaging. It is a disruptive innovation inasmuch as it removes the need for any financial services firm to engage directly in the costly area of tax reclamation. (...)

Disruption is mainly about resources processes and values (01/18/2010)
(...) As incremental innovations eventually make the performance of any product exceed the needs of the majority of the market, value chain evolution describes how the majority of the profits move elsewhere in the value chain. Companies choose whether to be vertically integrated or to specialise, with suppliers and distributors providing the remainder of the value chain. Whether vertical integration or ‘componentisation' works best depends on whether the performance of the product underperforms or outperforms the needs of the majority of customers. (...)

What exactly does it take to be disruptive (01/18/2010)
(...) However, if that response is created within the existing business it will inevitably fail because the mechanisms the mainstream business uses to allocate resources will not favour the new innovation. Many disruptive innovations start in unserved markets, where the incumbents do not see any need to respond, and subsequently move into the overserved market where they start to remove the less-profitable customers from the incumbent. In fact, to be disruptive a product relying on new innovation must be capable of improving so that it gradually takes more and more of the incumbent's market. (...)

How to deal with disruption in the financial services industry (01/18/2010)
(...) The rest of this article is rightly focused on best practice and methodology for the deployment of technology. This article serves as a warning shot across the bows that insufficient attention and lateral thinking about new innovations could lead to disaster whereas historically such innovations have led only to minor annoyance. The underlying value proposition for the financial services industry is to manage, distribute and lend assets and to redistribute risk. (...)

What is the best business model when facing a disruption (01/18/2010)
(...) Documentation is not often cited as a method of delivering value in and of itself. I disagree. While documentation is normally reserved for the process control, its effective use can materially improve the speed with which any given deployment delivers value into the business. (...)

Facts on business intelligence and IT governance (01/18/2010)
(...) If the hierarchy of information transfer recognises the roles of all those involved, and their accountability and the need to understand processes, then it might be claimed to be transparent. This confers governance on the IT realm. The structures for decision making may vary. (...)

Implementing solutions and frameworks for IT governance (01/18/2010)
(...) The natural project for IT governance is a large-scale, complex implementation. It seems that the larger the solution the greater the need for governance. But in reality, even smaller-scale endeavours need the rigour of an IT governance discipline. (...)

How to understand the board responsibilities of an organization (01/17/2010)
(...) Practical implementation of effective systems of control is seen as the way to ensure real governance. Through these, transparency and risk management are made real. For example, the application of standards, notably ISO standards, is an option. (...)

A few facts on information security and accountability (01/17/2010)
(...) The initial decision makers in software development or procurement processes must be accountable for performance since they have established the criteria on which performance assessment is made. This is especially so since regulation, notably in the financial sector, is focused on accountability and the way this responsibility is acknowledged and acted upon within the organisation. Accountability permeates the entire organisation. (...)

What are tracking and monitoring in a business activity (01/17/2010)
(...) This data helps a regulator to be efficient in the way it targets its own resources, identifying potential issues that may require action such as increased supervision of a sector or product type or production of consumer information. Collecting data on mortgages, life policies, general insurance, collective investment schemes and SCARPS might be carried out on a quarterly basis. Crucially, the data is collected elctronically and covers direct sales and those made through an intermediary. (...)

IT spending and integrating business activities (01/17/2010)
(...) In Spring 2007, the research organisation Datamonitor noted that IT budgets have increased by an average of 11% in the trading, brokerage, fund management, investments and securities, and hedge fund sectors during 2007. The prediction is for a big spending year in 2008 for financial service organisations looking to boost their IT infrastructures. The advances in IT in general and infrastructures in particluar have transformed the way financial services do business, such as home banking, ATMs, trading systems, call-centres and so on. (...)

Contemporary business environments and IT governance in financial services (01/16/2010)
(...) Historically there has been a gap, or time lag between the breathless opportunities pushed by rapid technological development and the slower, earthbound needs of business in general. This has led to a difference in culture, where IT systems have been grudgingly admitted as being necessary, but seen as a cost to the business, a cost which is detrimental and which should be reduced. Meanwhile the IT culture, carried by the wave of falling procurement costs, more realisable solutions and a growing complexity in business life and supply chains has pushed hard for budget. (...)

Building a project and budget control (01/11/2010)
(...) These elements, described below, have almost the same relationship to each other as aims do to objectives and objectives have to activities. Each is a nested element that relates both upwards and downwards and is iterative in any good deployment. 1. (...)

Complete accountability comes with a built solution (01/11/2010)
(...) The firm was finding an unacceptably high level of NPW. Overall, management therefore had little real control over the sales process and more importantly could not help management to improve productivity. Their response to these market conditions was to provide their sales force with a new laptop-based computer application designed to make the process of selling pensions more efficient. (...)

Buying build solutions versus building your own (01/11/2010)
(...) Over 60% of all the software companies in the United Kingdom, for instance, have less than 15 employees. This is because, particularly in financial services, many of the supplier companies are either deliberate or accidental spin-offs from the IT departments and almost without exception single-product companies. Someone there saw an opportunity and figured that there was more money to be made selling it as an outsider or the firm itself spun off part of the department either because it saw it as non-core, a distraction or because it simply wanted to reduce costs. (...)

What is reversion in business management (01/11/2010)
(...) Usually either the software company is so strapped for cash due to plateauing or declining sales and failure to invest or it manages finances well or through competitive pressure, that it is forced to first lower its license fees. This is a signal that cash flow is more important than the product. Apart from the signal that this sends to earlier purchasers of the product, an intelligent project manager will analyse a prospective vendor's pricing history to look for such tell-tale signs. (...)

What means bureau in technology acquisition stakes (01/11/2010)
(...) One of the values brought to this model by SEI is the provision of ‘best-of-breed' service providers so that a purchasing institution can opt for those elements of the back office service that it either has not already built or bought solutions. This seems to be a best-fits-all scenario and it is certainly true that if you presume that there is a plethora of solutions available in the market, it is much more likely that you'll find the benefits of those solutions outweigh the build option. The problem is that each of those other options will probably have elements for which you have no need and as such they are overspecified. (...)

How and when to outsource in business today (01/11/2010)
(...) There are some areas of bank operations which, while they may be core by our previous definitions, are nonetheless extremely complex and expensive to undertake. These are also the ones which an FI finds it most onerous to be competent in. To take a wholesale banking back office example, making sure that the net results of corporate actions such as dividend distribution are dealt with effectively includes attention to international taxation of such instruments. (...)

ASP providers manage the data flow (01/08/2010)
(...) These banks rely on the provider's investment processing technology and entrust them with the actual management and processing of client transactions - often called the ‘back-office' operations. By relying on the provider's expertise, these banks and trust institutions can reduce risk and achieve operational efficiencies, thereby improving the quality of services. This will also generally lead to a reasonable reduction in head count of back-office personnel, because most of their jobs will have been outsourced to the BSP. (...)

Systems which allow for comprehensive instrument coverage (01/08/2010)
(...) Due to confidentiality issues that fund managers must contend with and the fact that the funds are most often organised as partnerships, the necessary limited partner beneficial owner information cannot be transmitted to the prime broker necessitating that the fund manager implement alternative solutions. Implementing alternate solutions as you may have gathered by now is not necessarily as simple as picking up the phone book and searching under back office support. Given the issues that hedge funds have with regard to services not provided by their prime brokers, in order to ensure successful operations, they need to address two primary issues. (...)

Visible signs of technology deployment in financial services (01/08/2010)
(...) Second in its capacity as an industry-owned cooperative, it also operates a unique computer network between its members, all of whom are financial institutions. The combination of guardian of standards and provider of message routing places SWIFT in a very powerful position. Virtually any major technology deployment tioday will need to take advantage and note of standardisation of messaging. (...)

SWIFT management and its changes (01/08/2010)
(...) In this scenario, there would be far more appetite for firms to find and develop new and better ways to do business as they could gain the benefit directly from having invested in the process improvement within their organisations and also get paid royalties (or deductions from traffic fees) by SWIFT for having assisted in a general improvement. This highlights one of the issues in managing technology today. The cost of improving a process or deploying a technology is very often hidden, with specific aspects overlooked. (...)

SWIFT with standards and network routing (01/08/2010)
(...) Double tax treaties between pairs of countries allow for a recipient to be entitled to recover tax that is essentially over-withheld by the issuing country, but the procedures and processes by which the recipient's custodian is able to do this are both complex and expensive because they are essentially manual. So this case study looks at how. GlobeTax, with a processing solution, SWIFT with standards and network routing and one of the largest custodians collaborated to create a new paradigm. (...)

Global strategy to automate corporate actions (01/08/2010)
(...) Live production in which data is received and acted on by GlobeTax. The model was tested using six branches of the custodian each located in a different European country. Twenty client accounts were used representing three types of beneficial owners resident in four countries. (...)

What is open source software (01/08/2010)
(...) This had led to a high degree of confidence in its efficacy. For the firm, an attraction is the way support can be addressed - open source enables a company to select among a number of providers, often minimising risk by mixing and matching support. This approach helps establish control of the supplier and the support base. (...)

How institutions procure their software (01/08/2010)
(...) Is the software vendor viable? That is, is it likely to be around for an estimated five years, the safety margin of most written-down software assets? There are many such questions that contribute to the selection process. Inevitably there are trade-offs, but all vendors will attempt to address the questions as best as they can and seek to make themselves as competitive as possible. At the end it often seems to be a question of money - how much does it all cost? It is a cliché within the context of this article that software requirements are determined by the institution's strategic business objectives. (...)

A question on the maturity of the software (01/08/2010)
(...) This is very different for a single product developer. Whilst the developers of the code may be as professional as commercial coders, their binding interest is not monetary, and the drivers are not purely those of market demand. Their interests tend to be driven by curiosity and creative impulses. (...)

Linux and its use in business (01/08/2010)
(...) Good practice here is in line with assurances about the longevity of any software and coverage and access to code in the event of a software company failure. Generally software companies don't fail but are absorbed by larger competitors. OSS is not covered in this way. (...)

Approaches to acquiring technology (01/08/2010)
(...) Building a technology solution has for the last ten years at least been the least favoured of the technology solutions. This is partly due to the Y2K effect which was originally caused by the programmers responsible in the early seventies for the mainframe computing systems which banks have historically favoured because of their high transactional capabilities. With memory at that time being extremely expensive, the shortcut of using just two digits to represent the year was a logical one, but which was created because of their conservatism and lack of long-term planning capability. (...)

Why most mainframe systems are called legacy (01/08/2010)
(...) To achieve this they have to have, even at only a practical level, an understanding of why people do things. To this extent they are best placed to provide a semiindependent view for most technology deployments that will help people use systems more effectively. Some examples of questions rarely asked in a technology deployment but which can have material effect on their success and/or useability. (...)

Siloed approach of many financial services firms (01/06/2010)
(...) Resilience and disaster recovery4. Regulatory compliance5. Product development6. (...)

Technology enhances our ability to survive in corporate environments (01/06/2010)
(...) But there are two big psychological differences between then and now. In earlier days, publications were not viewed as an end in themselves, they were clearly a tool, a means to achieve an end, not an end in themselves. Second, because of the scarcity of publications and the lack of mass reading skills, no-one could rely on publications alone for their success. (...)

Principles of technology management in financial services (01/06/2010)
(...) If it was easy, this article wouldn't exist. One of the most important elements of any project in financial services these days is to either ensure or assure regulatory compliance. If its not the core objective of the project, it will still be there as a second tier. (...)

What each financial firm needs to do in order to succeed (01/06/2010)
(...) Each box in the triumvirate essentially has input and output, whether that be electronic, paper-based or verbal. In between the input and the output, each function must add value in some way to make the delivery of the four Ps effective. That is their one and only function. (...)