Simplifying IT Processes for Greater Business Agility

IT landscape is the lifeline of any enterprise – managing it well thus becomes a key business imperative. This is especially true of banks and financial institutions as they function in an economic environment that is often at the brink of volatility. Changes in the market and evolving customer expectations directly impact processes, which necessitates tweaks to back-end IT applications and software. With the passage of time, such modifications result in a complex IT architecture that becomes difficult to manage. In a business environment that is largely driven by ever-changing customer expectations, customer-centricity is the key to a profitable sustenance. Realizing this, banks and financial institutions are looking to modify their processes to match customer expectations, while ensuring greater business agility, improved operational efficiency, and reduced costs. This paper discusses the need for process improvement, explores the various tools available for simplification, and proposes a roadmap to achieve process excellence. Introduction Banks and financial institutions operate in a challenging environment marked by a sluggish economic recovery, compressed margins, tedious regulations, and stiff competition. In addition, the emergence of the empowered customer has made customer-centricity more a business imperative than a good-to-have feature. At the same time, banks are also under tremendous pressure to cut costs and grow profits. With a relatively slow pace of economic recovery adversely affecting top line growth, banks are increasingly evaluating improvement initiatives with the ability to drive profits through cost optimization and enhanced efficiencies. To differentiate themselves in the market, banks are looking to create customer-centric offerings. This calls for a large scale transformation of the back-end processes. Technology driven IT processes form the foundation of banking operations. Regardless of the initial setup, these processes invariably become complex over time, especially due to system modifications that are introduced in a piecemeal fashion. This in turn has an adverse impact on costs and operational efficiencies, therefore the need for implementing enterprise-wide simplification programs. Why Process Improvement? Simplification programs aim to reduce complexity and ensure cost optimization. This requires IT teams to design lean processes to achieve the desired metrics with regard to efficiency, cost, and customer-centricity. Processes are the building blocks through which work gets done, and form the backbone of services delivered to stakeholders. As businesses respond to changes – either in A Point of View