CRISIL Limited.

Uncertain economic  conditions around  the world have  forced many organizations to continue focusing on lowering costs and increasing productivity.  And technology is one of  the main weapons in their arsenal  to do this. Companies are trying to  figure out ways to automate critical  and time consuming processes using  technology. Three pillars of Organizational Technology:

Technology Infrastructure, business applications and information security .

The reason one should talk  about technology infrastructure  first, is that it touches employees  the moment they enter the office. From the data centre to the desktop,  infrastructure helps organizations  gain greater business agility, faster  time-to-value and improved operational  effectiveness with solutions  that empower employees to create  dynamic digital workplaces and  innovate ways to get the work  done. The cloud – whether  public, private or hybrid  has revolutionized IT  infrastructure, development  and management,  enabling IT  to offload the burden  of upgrades  and maintenance  and instead focus  on delivering business  value. Teams  can often be dispersed  widely across  countries and time  zones, but they need  to share content, information  and ideas as if they  were in the same room. Creating  an effective platform for collaboration  is essential. Enterprise  collaboration services transform the  way to work together by connecting  people, improving content sharing  and optimizing processes with services  for unified communications,  social computing, content management,  portals and applications. The  collaboration suite and the access  to all the enterprise applications  should be powered through the mobile  phone.

“ There is a need for a  world-class collaboration  suite which enables  employees to collaborate  via text, voice, video and  web meetings seamlessly  from any device and from  any part of the world”

The starting point of business  applications is application development.  Custom enterprise application  development provides  organizations with an alternative  to packaged solutions, giving the application development flexibility  it needs.

Managing customer  relationships effectively has always  been important. CRM transforms  the customer experience around  interactions that drive more profitable  relationships. It should go beyond  sales, marketing and service to  deliver industry-specific capabilities  that result in improved productivity  and efficiency at a competitive price.

Enterprise Resource Planning  (ERP) services underpin  organizations’ ability to operate in  economies and industries that are  subject to rapid change, creating  opportunities and challenges.  Data is digital’s core currency, so  turning data into a strategic asset is  a business imperative, whether it’s  about organizing the data, creating  governance and strategy, data  warehousing, or applying industry,  mobile or predictive analytics.

Through it all, one needs to  keep the focus firmly on the user  experience. User experience can  make or break a solution. User  expectations soar as the gap widens  between modern technology,  consumer experience and the  applications employees use at  work. Therefore, the interface and  functionality for all services and  tools provided to the employees  should have the user in mind.

The third pillar, information security, deals with the processes and  methodologies which are designed  and implemented to protect a  business from unauthorized access  to, misuse or disruption of data.

We need to invest in stateofthe art infrastructure ranging from  desktops to data centers. All critical  services like internet, email, MPLS  links, networks, firewalls, servers,  databases and storage are configured  in high availability to make sure  the reliability is high and the user  experience is great. There is a need  for a world-class collaboration  suite which enables employees to collaborate via text, voice, video  and web meetings seamlessly from  any device and from any part of the  world. The business applications  need to be customized to the  organization’s requirements since  the business processes are unique  for every business and that it’s not  often that the relevant product is  available in the market. A business  intelligence tool for data analytics  is which integrates with business  applications and provides  the required reports and  management dashboards, improves  the process of decision making.  Information security (IS) should  be the topmost priority because of  the nature of the business.  

Emerging technology trends in BFSI  Mobile:

Mobile: We’re entering a ‘mobile  only’ era, where we see outcomes  that would be impossible without  today’s persistent connectivity.

Social: Businesses are no longer  building technologies just to  enable interaction; they are now  engineering social platforms for  specific contexts.

Analytics: Data needs to be made  personal if it is to foster more  meaningful relationships, and enable  experiential service and products. 

strong>Cyber security: Customers have  learnt to trust their financial  institutions to quickly detect,  isolate, and contain a cyber threat  when it occurs.

There is enough evidence of the  shift taking place as organizations  move beyond a monomaniacal focus  on cost control to a more balanced  approach to profitable growth in this  new technology-enabled world. Any  organization not shifting towards  the above trend will have tough  times ahead and will find it difficult  to survive in the competitive  market.

Founded in 1987 in Mumbai, India, CRISIL is a global analytical company that provides ratings, research, and risk and policy advisory services.