Viewpoints: Business Process Efficiency
- Saturday, November 1, 2008, 12:06
- Special Features, Viewpoints
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In today’s competitive environment, financial institutions are challenged to meet customers’ expectations, accelerate the time-to-market, optimize constrained resources, improve productivity, leverage IT investments and make better decisions based on current data. But considering the number of mergers over the last decade, that’s a tall order to fill. It’s not unusual for organizations to be made up of multiple business units with separate IT departments, user directories and applications. Many are struggling to assess how much information exists in their organizations.
Business Process Efficiency (BPE) solutions enable firms to redesign their processes so they can address these challenges and reach their goals. Such tools provide a secure framework in which people can do research, collaborate on key findings, analyze risk, manage content and store documents. By automating business processes, firms can reduce the time and cost of performing important functions, improve efficiency and address the need for governance, risk and compliance.
Microsoft’s MOSS 2007 has emerged as a valuable enabler of BPE. It is a cost-effective way to simplify how people find and share information across boundaries and ultimately make better-informed decisions. Microsoft partners can play a key role by contributing their domain expertise and integrating their applications with an infrastructure that has the potential to transform business.
Keeping a Clear Head When Working in the Cloud
Competitive demands have changed the financial services industry dramatically over the past several years. New products must speed to market. New and existing services must quickly evolve to keep up with new competitors that are altering the service paradigm with emerging delivery channels. Customers and markets have heightened expectations for unique and varied services, while financial services institutions (FSIs) are pressed to be efficient. All this is occurring amid relentless globalization. To meet these competing demands, the industry has built a virtuous web of human resources, processes, and technologies that must function seamlessly.
Meanwhile, technology has changed the nature of work itself. Workers have had to adapt to new methods of work based on changing business models. Outsourcing of business processes has become common, as have partnerships and alliances featuring collaboration, often across continents. The collaboration is orchestrated by both synchronous and asynchronous work models enabled by interactive technologies. And change will continue at an even more rapid pace as a new generation enters the workforce that has very different expectations than previous generations regarding both the nature of work and the technologies that support it. The expansion of social networking as a means of interaction and the development of a plethora of technologies enable ubiquitous collaboration.
Technology and business have changed simultaneously through a symbiotic relationship in which each responds to opportunities represented by changes in the other. The result has been an overall change in the way people work in a knowledge-based economy. Today, it is not unusual for workers to be part of several ad hoc teams set up to develop and execute specific projects or tasks. The tools needed to execute on the development of new products and services include a secure framework that is a place to share knowledge, collaborate on development, analyze options, manage content, and store documents. Workflow, tracking, monitoring, and governance capabilities are also essential ingredients for successful development and ongoing delivery of a networked workplace where people can meet on a common objective. It is in fulfilling this need that portal technology found its first successes.
Demand for collaboration among greater numbers of people who are widely dispersed in different locations and who all have different expectations defies the tradition of regular hours, common schedules, and even a single technology. Beyond business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions or interaction, the way we work and live has evolved to “business-to-life” (B2L) convergence, in which work, service, and personal lives are converging in a virtual “cloud.” Exhibit 1 outlines the nature of multiple technological formats and ways of interacting that are rapidly becoming integrated.
The trends captured in the exhibit exacerbate the problem of finding a common work environment for internal business operations and in external service delivery. Fortunately, portals are evolving into efficient environments to facilitate B2L convergence. The evolution of the portal as a business process efficiency (BPE) tool has been critical to sustaining ever higher levels of productivity. FSIs are leveraging BPE through internal portals to share business intelligence and information securely across the enterprise any time and from anywhere. External portals can be used by FSIs both to deliver services and to monitor customer interactions with business partners to ensure successful leverage of relationships.
Thus, the continued dispersion of resources, markets, and customers does not mean a dispersion of business results. To the contrary, today’s portal technology offers the security, reliability, flexibility, and intuitive usability both to fulfill internal business needs and to provide seamless delivery of market-facing initiatives.
This article is based on research by the Financial Services Strategies and IT Investments Practice at TowerGroup, a leading research and advisory services firm focused exclusively on the global financial services industry.
MicroLink Teamwork Solutions Improve Organizational Efficiencies
Financial institutions are looking for a better way to do business. BPE solutions allow them to optimize constrained resources, improve productivity, leverage their IT investments and make better decisions based on current data. Malcolm Hyson, CTO of MicroLink, explains how pre-packaged BPE solutions meet clients’ needs and return a fast ROI.
WFS: How does MicroLink help firms benefit from BPE?
MH: We address problems that are common to most organizations. If a financial institution says they have a document management issue, we solve it by providing them with a pre-packaged scenario based on our experience working in similar environments.
We’re a solution-centric company. We might utilize Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) as part of our overall solution architecture, but it’s not the sole product in a typical implementation. We feel that it is more important to take different technology components and combine them to meet the client’s specific business needs.
Our solutions include capabilities such as performance management, dashboarding, metrics and real-time data collection. That’s important because ultimately our goal is to enable our clients to manage their business in real-time. They need to detect issues as they surface so that corrective action can be taken well before the quarterly or yearly report cycles.
We also support customers’ records management and retention needs by helping them comply with regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley. Since companies need to manage content they must have clear data and document retention policies. Our solutions ensure that departmental regulations are followed without forcing users to understand an awkward application.
WFS: How are you working with Microsoft in the BPE arena?
MH: Microsoft products such as SharePoint Server and Exchange started off as fairly closed platforms. Over time they evolved and became great standalone products, but they also are key components of an enterprise development framework.
Moreover, there is a cross-pollination of capabilities across many products. Several Microsoft products enable both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. These allow organizations to connect people in real-time, build com-
munities of knowledge and track progress toward a group objective. MicroLink works with clients to determine when, where and how to use the different components in the Microsoft product lines to meet their business objectives.
In particular, MicroLink delivers a platform using ISA Server for client authentication, Exchange Server on the back end for email, SharePoint Server for asynchronous col-
laboration and Office Communication Server for real-time collaboration. So it comprises multiple products on the back end, but the client receives an integrated solution to meet their needs.
MicroLink won Microsoft’s Repeatable Solutions award in 2008. This recognizes us as a company that can leverage Microsoft technologies and platforms to provide solutions that solve clients’ business problems and can be repeated across multiple engagements. In short, our sweet spot is returning a quick ROI for our clients.
WFS: Can you give an example of a financial organization you’ve worked with?
MH: Currently we’re working with the FDIC to migrate from SharePoint 2003 to MOSS 2007. The goal is for the organization to better manage internal processes and enhance productivity. In particular, the FDIC is refining its records retention policy around how documents are stored and decommissioned after the required retention period.
WFS: How do you see BPE solutions affecting the industry?
MH: As the industry becomes more competitive and the need for innovation grows, we think financial organizations are going to expect more rapid solution development and shorter delivery cycles. That means there will be increased demand for pre-wrapped solutions offered by firms like MicroLink.Secondly, both Microsoft and MicroLink are investing in cloud computing technology. Going forward, we expect many companies will weave together a mixture of internal and external services to create an integrated end solution.
Hyland Software Drives Efficiency With Transactional Content Management
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions allow organizations to automate business processes, reduce the time and cost of performing important functions, improve organizational efficiency, and address the need for governance, risk and compliance. Jason King, director of financial services and insurance, and Ken Burns, manager for industry communications at Hyland Software, Inc. explain how financial institutions can realize measurable benefits from this technology.
WFS: What are the drivers behind BPE in financial services?
JK: Financial firms often rely on old technology that can’t adapt to the business needs of the organization. Eventually, productivity is affected, so they start losing money in operations. Their systems can’t keep up with current business demands, and that has a negative impact on customer service. Then they run into other problems when they cannot meet compliance and regulatory requirements.
When investing in core lines-of-business applications to improve process efficiency, many financial institutions overlook the limitations of those systems to handle the steps in a process that takes place outside of those systems. Usually these involve routing and entry of information contained in paper documents that either originate outside the organization or were printed from other internal systems at another point in the process.
Insurers, banks and credit unions look to transactional content management (TCM) applications like document imaging, report management and workflow automation to capture, organize and manage these documents in a central repository. TCM should be a key component of any overall ECM strategy. The greatest benefit of a TCM suite is the work that can be done with those documents once they are in the system.
TCM systems act as kind of a middleware. They feature rules-based workflow functionality to automate the routing of related sets of documents and content files to appropriate points in a process, whether that’s a person or another application. They also make it possible to link content-based information to the data records stored in any number of line-of-business applications used in the course of a given process. Instead of a process worker having to leave their core business application to search for documents related to a particular transaction, a TCM application will enable the employee to retrieve any document they need from within interface of their core applications – all with a single click of a mouse.
ECM is an umbrella term that covers several different flavors of content management applications. Each are optimized for solving a different set of business problems. Our particular flavor is TCM, which manages the relationships between sets of documents associated with a transaction or account. It then associates those sets of files with corresponding data stored in lines-of-business applications such as an LOS or ERP system. TCM also uses workflow and capabilities and automates the processing of those files that would otherwise be handled manually by people.
At the simplest level, think of transactional ECM solutions as allowing you to process and manage your documents in synch with your data.
WFS: What challenges do financial institutions face when it comes to implementing BPE?
KB: Most people are used to working in a paper-based environment, and transactional ECM systems force them to change habits of a lifetime. That’s a significant barrier for organizations to overcome. Interestingly, for all the talk about Web 2.0 technologies, the market for solutions that convert paper-based processes to electronic processes is only about half-saturated. That indicates just how much resistance is out there.
WFS: So how do you help organizations overcome the resistance?
KB: Hyland Software tries to expose our technology and software applications through whatever system end users rely on most. Let’s say an end user accesses documents from the core system to do their job. We’re not trying to compete for desktop space with that core system. We augment it in order to reduce training and resistance to embracing ECM technology.
That’s a big part of what Microsoft is trying to accomplish with SharePoint. It’s adjoining a personal productivity application like Office with an operational productivity application such as a core system or a document management system from Hyland Software. SharePoint provides yet another familiar interface in which to embed those applications.
WFS: How does Hyland Software’s OnBase® solution help firms introduce BPE into their organization?
JK: Once the paper has been digitized, the next logical step is to automate a workflow process and manage a business process using rules and routing capabilities. Hyland Software offers an array of vertically specialized solutions to help accomplish that.
Our solution helps insurers deliver better customer service by reducing claims turnaround time. A document and folder can be automatically routed for resolution, so a claim can be processed in less than 24 hours. Moreover, our software can increase a carrier’s new business underwriting capacity by 40%.
Both commercial and residential lenders benefit by improving efficiency in loan document processing. Our workflow solutions can automatically deliver digitized documents lodged in a central repository to an investor in the secondary market. This minimizes the time it takes to review the paper documents.
A credit union may take advantage of our solution to respond to member queries in real-time. A teller or member service representative can simply look up the digitized transaction records on the system while the member waits.
WFS: Do you have any client examples you can share with us?
JK: Capstone Realty Advisors (Cleveland) services 2,000 existing loans and more than 500 new loans annually. When a new loan closes, Capstone immediately scans the entire file and users access documents in OnBase.
OnBase enabled Capstone to destroy 270 boxes of paper, totaling 1.5 million sheets. The staff has access to 2,000 large loan files across eight locations. Productivity is improved because documents can be viewed simultaneously. In addition, Capstone has improved customer service.
WFS: How are you working with Microsoft to allow financial institutions to take advantage of BPE?
KB: Hyland Software always has been a Microsoft centric organization. In fact, we were among the first vendors 15 years ago to start building document imaging and management software on Windows. Whereas some vendors build software with a Unix back end and a Windows client, our software is built on Windows from back to front so it’s optimized for top performance in a Microsoft environment. Now we’re porting our software architecture completely over to .NET. About 97% of our customers use Microsoft SQL Server for their database and a significant amount of our integration points are with Microsoft Office. That means firms can take advantage of their Microsoft infrastructure investment using our software.
We’re investing heavily to integrate with and extend Microsoft’s SharePoint platform. Just like Microsoft Office provides a desktop productivity tool on 85% of the desktops in the world today, SharePoint provides those same knowledge workers with pervasive access to collaborative document management and intranet Web capabilities. Hyland Software offers nearly 15 packaged Web parts that expose OnBase functionality through a SharePoint interface. SharePoint can be used as the front end for accessing OnBase, or for using OnBase to scan documents directly into SharePoint.
WFS: What advice do you have for firms who want to implement BPE technologies?
JK: Everybody’s talking about how they can completely transform business with ECM technology, but it’s important to cut through the hype. Hyland Software’s philosophy is to enable our customers to do their job better, faster and deliver superior customer service. If our customers have a specific business pain, we have a solution that can address it. We must be very clear about what we can and cannot do for them.
Dow Jones: Moving Beyond Basic Taxonomies Toward Ontologies
Windows in Financial Services spoke to Christine Connors, Dow Jones’ global director of Semantic Technology Solutions, about Synaptica, its semantic tool that is fast capturing the attention of Wall Street.
WFS: Let’s start with a brief introduction to business semantics and why it is so critical for the financial community.
CC: Business semantics provide a common, standardized framework that allows data to be shared and reused across applications, enterprises and community boundaries. The semantic Web is a universal medium for exchanging information that can be processed electronically and still convey meaning and relevance for consumers.
It is critical that the financial services community provide import and export support for business semantics to enable easier data exchange. Consider the SEC’s Interactive Data Electronic Applications (IDEA) announced August 19, 2008, which will replace EDGAR. The goals of IDEA are to make up-to-date financial disclosures easily accessible to investors in a format they can more readily adapt to their own applications.
Greater interoperability is based on standardization and integration into public and proprietary applications leading to more opportunities. More customers can use it because it enables unanticipated uses by unanticipated users.
WFS: Tell us about your semantic tool Synaptica and the enhancements you’ve made this year.
CC: Synaptica 7.0 provides standardized, semantic Web-enabled tools to manage your global business vocabulary in order to add structure and value to existing information assets, improve the online user experience and connect professionals in your organization with the information they need, where and when they need it.
Version 6.4, launched in June 2007, introduced a new user interface and design to simplify the user experience, navigation and screen layout.
Version 7.0, deployed in March 2008, moves beyond user experience design and provides new on-screen tools that improve editorial workflows and overall performance.
The new release provides some key benefits: Synaptica’s new side-by-side relationship editor makes the creation and editing of terms a one-step process while its drag-and-drop hierarchical relationship editing provides a simple, convenient way to manage vocabulary hierarchies. Its Term Information Summary Window provides quick views of term details. Further, in addition to CSV, HTML and XML formats, reports may be created in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Synaptica User and Administrative Guides are now available online directly from the application to browse and search.
Some additional benefits include: more efficient creation, management and distribution of controlled vocabularies; and a new, flexible pricing model that breaks down prior cost of ownership barriers to sales.
Version 7.0 provides easy configuration; is scalable with multi-user permissions; is customizable and flexible with audience-centric views; supports collaboration and workgroups; and is standards-based and semantic Web enabled. It also supports multiple data formats (HTML, XML, etc.) and provides Web services and API level access for simple integration.
WFS: What are the key advantages of Synaptica for Wall Street?
CC: Financial Services companies are always struggling to assess how much information exists in their organizations. On Wall Street accessing the right information at the right time can mean a difference between making money or losing it. Synaptica supports the cataloging, classification and management of digital and physical content objects for a clear view of enterprise knowledge assets. More importantly, Synaptica allows enterprise-wide distribution of core metadata to consuming systems, leading to the shrinking of information silos and improving knowledge dissemination.
Enterprise search investments are not meeting expectations. Too many search results are returned, and critical documents are often missing or buried within numerous results pages. Synaptica integrates with systems such as search, content management and document management to improve both precision and recall for improved findability and discovery.
Blogs, wikis, social tagging and other attempts at social knowledge management are frequently creating more noise and less value. For mere seconds and a few clicks, authors can greatly reduce the time to find the data they spent valuable time creating, and give it clear meaning. Synaptica supports them by providing a robust tool for modeling and integrating the language of the users into these tools.
Large or diversified organizations that have deployed a taxonomy are finding that the one-size-fits-all approach is not working. A taxonomy reflects the management practices, identity and branding of an organization. Balancing the core corporate message with the ability to support role or function-specific annotations and additions is a strength of Dow Jones’ offering. Synaptica encourages moving beyond the typical hierarchies used by taxonomies to custom relationship and category building and removing end-user confusion via the “MyView” browsing tool.
WFS: How does Dow Jones differ from other players in the space?
CC: Dow Jones is already well-known for producing global news and financial information and with expertise in semantic technologies, is well-positioned to take information management to the next level. We understand the challenges facing companies trying to integrate disparate data sources because we have faced them ourselves. Dow Jones Intelligent Indexing, our own business vocabulary, contains nearly 2 million entities. We categorize over 5 million articles per month in a global network of 24×7 coding desks. We use best of breed technologies rather than betting our value on a single method.
We can provide product and services for all phases of business vocabulary deployment: licensing of vocabularies (Dow Jones and others); build, customize and maintain vocabularies (courtesy of Dow Jones Client Solutions); optimize, manage and integrate vocabularies (with Synaptica); promote industry current awareness (at TaxonomyWarehouse.com and SynapticaCentral.com).
WFS: Data overload is becoming more of an issue these days for financial professionals. How do you see semantics changing information consumption?
CC: Traditionally, providers of enterprise search applications had to make tradeoffs between precision and recall. Precision is when a search returns ONLY relevant results. Recall is when a search returns ALL possibly relevant results. In the semantic world, we can have our cake and eat it too, which is precisely what we want, and all objects that contain what we want.
Semantic technologies will enable more granular algorithms. Financial professionals will gain greater control over algorithmic trading and be able to filter based on details about events rather than just awareness of them. Greater integration of unstructured data sources with CRM systems will give adopters an edge in delighting customers.
WFS: What are the major trends you see emerging in the next 12-18 months?
CC: I believe we will see greater emphasis on user interaction models for the semantic Web: user interface aesthetics and usability will be greatly improved. The query tools have to be simple, while retaining their power, for adoption to happen. Proof and trust will become critical components for the user: the system must detail why it delivered an answer, and where the answer came from. Users and groups will demand the capability to indicate their trusted sources of information.
WFS: Synaptica is expected to have SharePoint capabilities for release in November. How will that affect your offering to the financial community?
CC: The financial community will have a greater ability to integrate structured and unstructured data from within and outside of the firewall. A common framework of concepts in a standard exchange format will enable users to traverse diverse data stores to uncover business-critical relationships. A footnote from an SEC filing, combined with trend analysis from an internal database and a person-targeted snippet from the lifestyle pages might provide all a savvy trader needs to make a crucial decision.
WFS: What can we expect next from Dow Jones?
CC: We are working on stronger integrations with SharePoint and FAST as part of a larger strategy to improve query and discovery tools. Our v1 SharePoint integration will launch in November 2008 and give organizations the power to develop and manage enterprise-wide taxonomies to navigate the challenges of precise information search and discovery.
Centrally managing your enterprise-wide taxonomies can enhance SharePoint and enterprise search investments. Integrating Synaptica into SharePoint is simple and uses standard solution package deployment methods. And, depending on customer requirements, it is an economical solution to support your growing business as it evolves on the semantic Web.
Among other things, the Synaptica and SharePoint Integration features include the ability to:
- import a vocabulary (or list of terms) from Synaptica into SharePoint as a list, to associate with other items such as document libraries
- tag content in real-time using search or browse capabilities against Synaptica vocabularies
- search for content using dynamic access to Synaptica vocabularies
We have a strong team dedicated to building quality knowledge models for more accurate information retrieval and analysis. We are moving beyond basic taxonomies toward ontologies – where the identification of real-world entities is important, but the detailing of relationships among entities is paramount. It’s an exciting time to be in the content space!
For more information about Dow Jones and to register for a free trial offer of Synaptica, please visit www.solutions.dowjones.com/movingbeyond
Changing the Collaboration Game One Enterprise at a Time
It is no secret how popular Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has been for enterprises, and Wall Street is no exception. WFS spoke to Microsoft’s Capital Markets head Craig Saint-Amour and Pej Javaheri, senior product manager on the SharePoint team, to fill us in on the benefits of SharePoint Server, a product that has already reached the 100 million user level since its 2001 launch.
WFS: Tell us how Microsoft is helping Wall Street maximize efficiency in their business processes?
CS: In addition to powerful technologies that provide the speed and edge, Microsoft’s Capital Markets Industry Unit and its partners – who are part of the broadest partner ecosystem in the industry – have developed solutions to address critical business problems and challenges the industry faces today. These business solutions leverage leading Microsoft technologies and the expertise of Microsoft and its partners to help companies automate and streamline business processes, enhance interactions with clients, achieve regulatory compliance, accelerate trading, and achieve higher alpha in trading activities. Capital markets business solutions include Advisor Platform, Institutional Client Platform, Risk Management and Compliance, Order Management and Trade Execution, and Investment Management.
WFS: How has the credit crisis impacted capital markets firms’ purchase of technology tools? What are the primary purchase factors you see existing today?
CS: We have seen most companies modify their IT strategy and approach to buying technology tools, but the degree of change in strategy and tightening of IT budgets has varied widely. Those companies hit hardest by the credit crisis – those capital markets firms involved in trading and investing in mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) – have undergone corporate-wide downsizing and have dramatically reduced or exited riskier lines of business. Their IT spending on new projects has been slashed and many current projects have been put on hold until the dust settles on the companies’ new direction and business priorities. The IT strategy for this group of companies is to help their company slash costs, do more with less resources, and gain a better understanding and control of risks.
Those capital markets companies that have not been hit hard by the credit crisis, but are feeling the effects of the slowdown have moved to control costs and IT purchases. Doing more with less is a common theme and delays in IT projects and purchases are common. Every project and dollar spend has to be rejustified.
There are a number of key areas which companies continue to invest their IT dollars. For example, we see many firms continuing to invest in IT around ways to differentiate their firm in the marketplace and to reduce market, operational, and regulatory risks. IT purchases around enhancing the client experience, streamlining business processes, gaining business knowledge from corporate data for better decisioning, risk management, and data security are at the top of IT spending priorities for the rest of 2008 and for 2009.
WFS: What is your advice to capital markets firms on striking the right balance between people empowerment and IT control?
CS: Social computing and collaboration tools such as team sites, wikis, blogs, instant messaging, ‘pre-
sence’ information, per-
sistent group chat, etc., are increasingly being deployed in capital markets companies to improve the ease and speed of knowledge sharing across the enterprise, the ability of virtual teams to collaborate, the speed of business communication and decisioning, and, ultimately, to bottom line business performance. Companies have to assess these new technologies, how they fit into their corporate content management and collaboration environment, and how to best to obtain the value these new tools deliver while controlling real risks. Clear policies for the proper use of social computing tools are required to achieve greater value and to guide workers to prevent improper uses of systems, loss of company/client- sensitive information, and damage to corporate brands and the company’s image in the marketplace. Without adequate control and policies, users could easily let proprietary corporate information leak out, offend other workers and clients, and create information chaos.
WFS: What do you see as the future of content management and collaboration software on Wall Street and Microsoft’s role in that future?
CS: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has helped changed the game for content management and collaboration software. In recent years, companies have begun to move toward a single content repository for ease of administration and retention. However, content will still remain on hard drives, on email systems, and local files share. In addition, social computing collaboration channels will become an important component of an enterprise’s total content and must be managed to control risks, while still empowering information workers with the free flow of knowledge for enhanced productivity and decision-making. Having a flexible, powerful enterprise content platform like SharePoint Server that allows you to manage all types of content and connects all repositories across the enterprise will be critical to efficient enterprise content management.
WFS: What would you say is pushing SharePoint Server’s popularity on Wall Street?
PJ: There are a number of reasons why SharePoint Server is so popular: ease of use, interoperability with personal productivity tools, access to information including documents, structured sources, or data that lives outside of the organization via Web services – all in a single environment.
For business users, they have access to the information they need easily, and at the speed they are used to. For IT, it provides a single framework that span’s across their entire organization, securely, and easily extensible.
With SharePoint Server, organizations have an array of capabilities that encompasses collaboration, search, portal, content management, business processes, and business intelligence. We are finding that when companies deploy SharePoint Server, they initially have a single project in mind, and during the deployment, become aware of the other capabilities and begin to implement these as well. More importantly, we are seeing users adopt the technology and making it part of their everyday lives and processes. The overall simplicity of the interface, interoperability with Microsoft Office, and new features such as Excel Services, search, workflow, and MySites gives users the ability to manage, find, and share information easily. Users are able to control the information accuracy of documents, ensuring the most up-to-date information is always accessible, without involving IT.
Some examples include managing documents/emails with a SharePoint Server client billing system, general document management replacing file shares, performing historic performance analysis leveraging Excel Services by offloading Excel documents to a server, creating team and collaboration sites, creating sites to manage projects across departments,
SharePoint Server is also being deployed in an Extranet, and as a companies publicly facing site.
WFS: What are the most recent improvements to SharePoint Server relevant to Wall Street?
PJ: In its most recent release, SharePoint Server has made many improvements, and introduced new capabilities such as business process management and business intelligence capabilities including Excel Services, a thin Web browser view of Excel workbooks. These and many more improvements, allow organizations to broaden their use of SharePoint Server in new ways, and introduce new business applications to help users become more efficient. For instance, with Excel Services, customers can deploy a workbook, or parts of a workbook maintaining a single version of the truth for all users to view, securely. Increasingly, we are observing SharePoint Server to be the new Excel on Wall Street. We see firms using the custom development, workflow, and collaboration capabilities to streamline process, business logic, and predictive analysis in innovative ways for competitive advantage, just as in the early days of Excel.
WFS: How would you say SharePoint Server helps business process efficiency?
PJ: Users can easily access the information they require through an enterprise search environment, find other users to collaborate on projects, ensure they have the most relevant information at their fingertips, provide and enforce document retention policies, and provide a company infrastructure for sharing information and collaboration. With the new business processes and workflow capability, users and IT can now create paperless forms to collect and aggregate information correctly the first time, perform archiving tasks, version control, and create workflows that help move the business along, providing information to all relevant parties, and triggers that let everyone in the process understand what’s going on.
WFS: What developments can we expect the next 18 months?
PJ: I expect our exciting innovation to continue throughout the next 18 months along with the potential integration with best-of-breed search acquisition, FAST. We’ll continue to make improvements in areas of usability and infrastructure so there will be something for everyone. All I can say is stay tuned.
Epok: Secure Information Transfer Equals Increased Productivity
Oscar Fuster, vice president of Marketing and Strategic Alliances for Epok, Inc., recently shared his thoughts with us on BPE effectiveness in improving efficiency and productivity through secure, transparent information sharing.
WFS: How would you define the need for BPE tools in the financial services arena?
OF: Good BPE tools provide the means for redesigning process flow so as to eliminate inefficiencies. A business can then get directly to its goals, delivering on promises to customers with more time to focus on critical business decisions, quality and service improvement.
WFS: What are the challenges for BPE implementation at financial institutions?
OF: Rapid flow and changes of financial information demands efficient implementation from BPE tools, i.e. products that maximize existing infrastructure and prove the least disruptive to normal business flow. Given the sensitive nature of financial data, BPE technology also has to provide sufficient security, compliance protection and transparency for information distribution.
WFS: Can you give an example of how these themes might play out in or between organizations?
OF: Sure… in the merger/acquisition setting, the driving initial goal is to quickly create synergy between organizations, capitalizing on each organization’s information resources and fully maximizing the merger’s value. The parties are looking to quickly glue information together and bring new offerings to market. Since mergers often involve organizations with multiple existing business units and creation of new units, the distribution chain is usually extensive with separate IT departments, user directories and applications. A BPE product needs to accommodate and leverage these multiple infrastructures without sacrificing security or transparency in the transfer of each party’s intellectual property.
WFS: What does Epok provide to service organizations seeking BPE solutions?
OF: Epok provides a tool to ensure security, compliance protection, and authorization in information distribution. Epok software integrates with existing systems giving an organization the ability to leverage current authentication methods without burdening IT. Information gets shared efficiently and securely, facilitating better control and regulatory compliance.
WFS: How is Epok’s product different from traditional security/authentication tools?
OF: Traditional methods, such as biometric authentication and tokens, focus primarily on identify verification. Epok expands on this, allowing information owners to determine not just that someone is who she says, but also what information she is entitled to and why, based on what her role or membership is in the distribution chain. Using technology standards such as SAML and XRI wrapped in a familiar and intuitive GUI we also provide the capability to graphically depict and capture an entire trail of information distribution, i.e. to subcontractors or third-party vendors, giving business users and IT a wider range of security and control over information sharing.
WFS: How do Epok products interface with Microsoft SharePoint 2007?
OF: SharePoint is a breakthrough BPE platform for financial services organizations to organize and disseminate information. Epok adds the required security, authentication and audit controls so that shared information is in compliance with corporate and regulatory policy.
WFS: In addition to the merger setting, can you give another example of Epok/SharePoint application in financial services?
OF: Sure… several firms selling financial reports, analysis and ratings by subscription to large institutional and government clients are looking at SharePoint to build portal access for their products. Epok tools can securely package and bundle reports and other data for distribution via SharePoint, reducing cost and ensuring authorized-use only.
WFS: Where do you see BPE solutions taking financial services in the short and long term?
OF: BPE tools are already giving businesses greater, cost-effective capability for sharing financial information. This translates into greater opportunity for businesses to increase focus on critical decisions, development and quality. The bottom line, long term significant productivity gains in the industry.
imason Eases The Load For Insurance Carrier Processes
Within insurance carriers’ organizations the interaction between personnel when fulfilling client service tasks is often burdened down by manually-intensive and time-consuming processes. Kevin Clement, managing director with imason, explains how process automation can address these inefficiencies by improving the effectiveness of a carrier’s internal person-to-person dealings.
Why is process automation critical for insurance carriers?
KC: Increasingly the insurance buying process is being commoditized, with people’s choice of carrier based primarily on price rather than other service differentiators. In addition, it is fairly easy for individuals to switch from one carrier to another. As a result, policyholder loyalty to their insurance
provider is shrinking significantly.
Therefore carriers need to find ways to differentiate on service as opposed to price, to engender a long-term ‘sticky’ relationship with policyholders. One solution is to more quickly and easily service their customers by streamlining the way they deal with them.
What technologies are you using to enable process automation?
KC: There are several areas where insurance carriers can significantly reduce the time required to execute a core customer-facing process: policy generation, policy amending, claims processing, and underwriting and policy inquiries.
To highlight one specific example, imason has worked with a large group benefits insurance carrier whose policy amendment process required inputs from four distinct groups in their organization to complete a form comprising 3,500 separate fields. As a result, the process was time consuming, inefficient and subject to error.
Using Windows Workflow Foundation, which is part of the Microsoft toolkit for enabling workflow, we created a form in Microsoft Office InfoPath with conditional fields that streamlines a participant’s view of the information required of them, and in doing so significantly reduces the time it takes to fill out their portion. In addition, we’ve created an auto-populate function, where each policyholder’s data is immediately entered into the form, so employees only have to change those pieces of information that need to be amended.
Then after each employee has amended the fields that pertain to them, the form flows into Workbench, from where it passes directly to the next person in the workflow chain. This Workbench acts as a hub that consolidates disparate actions, it tracks the tasks that each individual has assigned to them, and prevents pieces of the process chain from getting lost in emails.
What benefits can this framework bring?
KC: Through tighter coordination of the sales, underwriting and policy administration groups, through the tracking of tasks via workbenches and workflow, and through enhanced usability and more efficient data entry – including auto population – this large insurance carrier will be able to cut their amendment cycle time by approximately 30%.
What is more, the capability we have im-
plemented allows them to track and report on key
metrics, such as amendment volume, amendment processing time and amendment activity by client. Therefore they can understand which policies are being changed most, and how long it takes to make an amendment. And by having that benchmark data the insurance carrier has been able to initiate a service excellence program to better and more expeditiously service their clients’
requirements.
Can this framework be extended to other parts of a carrier’s organization?
KC: Absolutely. At the insurance carrier we have been working with the policy origination component is tightly integrated into the process, and is likely to be the next piece they tackle. And then claims processing will be brought onboard as well. So you start to look at the entire service chain that exists with a customer, from the time a new policyholder is introduced through to the time you settle a claim with any of them.
As a result, significant improvements can be made at every stage of the client interaction process. And the bottom line is that by better servicing your clients you will ensure they are happier customers, making them more likely to remain with your organization as policyholders. So by introducing process automation into the business a carrier will once again be able to compete on something other than price.
