STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS:
Introduction:
The banking sector started developing in Australia during the early time of 18th century and the first bank started in 1817 and the first bank was the Bank of New South Wales. Later, many governments and private sector banks started developing in the Australian market. For our report, we would highlight the functions and activities of Bank of Queensland which was developed in 1874 and currently manage 252 branches across various states and cities of Australia. This report would focus on identifying various strategic management processes and another suitable ERP system which would support the functions and activities of the bank across all the centers and branches.
1. Define business processes:
The banking business has developed to a great extent and provides various services to the customer in order to maintain the competitive advantage over various competitors. The internet market has developed due to improved technology and a new service segment emerged along with regular services in the banking market. The bank is involved in various processes including with handling the current and savings accounts of the customer. The bank is involved in collecting deposits of the customer and withdrawals services. They would also involve in providing different types of loans like personal loan, credit cards, auto loans, and gold loans to name a few. The bank is required to maintain a minimum balance with the reserve bank and is involved in various business activities with them. The bank is involved in different business processes like international transaction activities and investment business processes of investing funds and providing these services through net banking and mobile banking facilities.
Bank of Queensland is involved in similar business processes just like any other banks. The Bank of Queensland is involved in various business processes like selling of mutual funds, personal and current accounts and all types of financial products to the customer. The foremost business activities and the process of the bank are to collect deposits and provide withdrawal service through cheque or ATM to the customer. Just like any other organization, the Bank of Queensland has the cashiers department, the finance department, marketing department, human resource, operations and customer service department in every branch. The marketing department is located at the head office and perform uniform marketing strategies for the brand. The human resource department performs the process of hiring and firing or exit interviews of the bank employees and would coordinate with the payroll department for the payment and salaries of the employees. The operations team of the bank would execute the process of deposits and withdrawal of cash for the customers and update their systems. The bank and work of the cash flows are performed by the operations team. The finance team would coordinate with the operations and accounts team for proper investment of the funds in order to generate revenue.
2. Develop business requirements:
Understanding the actual requirements of all the business processes and activities is the most important aspect of the organization. They need to gather all the information related to the requirements of all the processes in order to efficiently perform the business activities and enhance the customer satisfaction level. The organization would define all the requirements like the actual objective, the associated stakeholders who are the part of the organization, possible hurdles and difficulties they would encounter while performing the activities, possible solutions and requirement to resolve them before they cause any loss, the business model that would identify the actual process, and most importantly the actual work flow to identify the effectiveness of all the business activities and processes. The requirements of all the business activities would help the organization to understand the value and importance of those respective activities and be prepared for the unforeseen incidents which would impact the growth and profits of the bank.
The Bank of Queensland needs to identify the requirements of all the business activities which they execute on a daily basis as well as occasionally. The kind of systems they would require for the employees, the hiring of appropriate employees as per the requirements of the business activities, total investments and expenses and possible incidents which would increase the idle time and lead to losses. The Bank of Queensland is a big bank with many centers across the country; this indicates that they need to have proper coordination among all the branches in order to calculate exact profits and losses, investments and expenses. They store crucial data of the customer and their financial undertaking and hence they require an appropriate software and storage system which would be trustworthy and efficient enough to be reliable and ensuring the data is safe and secured. The bank needs to ensure that the system and software installed by the branches and centers are user-friendly for the employees and secure enough that it couldn’t be hacked by any expert hacker. The bank also needs to ensure that the collection team has proper resources to execute their job of collecting payments against default payment of credit cards and loans provided by the bank.
3. Determine the systems requirements
The banking sector is dealing with mathematical numbers to a large extent since they are dealing with the customer’s money. They need to identify the needs and requirements of the entire department before selecting the system for their business activities. The banks need to have an efficient ERP system which would be able to provide huge storage system since the volume of data generated by all the branches would be very high on a daily basis. This data is very useful for executing the analytical activities of the business in order to formulate their investment and marketing strategies. The data becomes the basis of these strategies and hence require special attention in terms of efficient storage systems. The security of the customer details is very important because this data included all the personal and financial details of the customer and can be misused or leaked to any unauthorized person or to the competitors.
When we analyze the system requirement of the Bank of Queensland, we would focus on all the business activities and respective departments. The bank has more than 250 branches which would require the system to store data of all the employees working at all these branches and identify the vacant position and other details like future vacancies and vacant positions as the result of termination or retirement or employees on notice period. The system should be able to be used for business analytics, business intelligence activities and data management system of all the data gathered by the bank on daily basis. The system should be inclined with other software and hardware currently utilized by them and support in terms of efficiency and effectiveness in performance. The results derived from the analytics and business intelligence activities would be used by the marketing department for developing new marketing strategies, offers, and new products. The operations team is the cashiers and the backend team of the company which would actually be dealing with the customer’s money. So, the system should be convenient in usage and time effective so that it improves the productivity of the employees instead of becoming a liability for the bank.
4. Software and vendor selection:
The selection process of the vendor and software would require proper analysis by the banks based on their size, business exposure, future plans and operational activities. This process is very tedious but requires proper analysis before making the final selection of the software and vendor because it is a costly affair and big investment as well as time-consuming. The banks need to ensure that they follow the selection process very strictly before making their final decision. The bank needs to, first of all, analyze the needs and requirements of branches and head offices in order to identify all the possible departments that would require the usage of the new software and how it would reduce the human efforts and increase the level of accuracy and reduce the time required in performing those activities. The next step would be identifying the possible vendors who could meet the requirements and provide a feasible solution for them. They could demand a detailed analysis and quotation from all the vendors to understand the offers. This list should include as many possible vendors based on the list of pros and cons in order to make an accurate analysis. Then the final selection would lead to selecting the vendor and the feasible software.
The Banks of Queensland is one of the most popular and trusted banks in Australia. This highlights the fact that the customer base of the bank is high and would require the best possible available solution and software to satisfy the requirements. The ERP solution is considered to be providing effectiveness in all aspects of the business activities and the best possible solutions available for the bank as the option would be Oracle’s NetSuite, SAP’s SAP Business One Professional, and Dynamics by Microsoft or Deltek Vision by Deltek. These companies are ranked among the top ten ERP solution providers in the country and could be able to support the business activities of the Bank of Queensland. The primary motive of the Bank of Queensland is to improve the efficiency of their business activities in order to reduce the idle time and improve productivity. This could easily be sufficed by these top knew ERP solutions providers in Australia.
5. Determine at least three (3) ways which companies or organizations utilize such technologies to improve business efficiency:
The possible options for the banks to generate revenue for the branch of the bank itself is through proper disbursement of the loan to correct customers who won’t default on their payments, charging interest on the loan amounts, charging fees for different services, late payment fees and penalty charges to the customer when they don’t abide by the policies of the banks. The bank also invests some part of the deposits in stock Exchanges and investments in start-ups. The business efficiency of the bank relies upon the improved number of customers, efficient loan repayments by the customers without defaults and reduction in the operational costs. There are many other aspects which would improve the business efficiency of the bank like improving the customer satisfaction level by efficient customer services, offering attractive and innovative products which would drive the attention of the customer, better returns and reduced interest rates and better complimentary services than other competitive banks. All the factors relied upon the reduction of the operational cost and improvement of the efficiency level which would improve the profits and revenues of the bank ultimately.
The Bank of Queensland would adapt to the same parameters which be easily evaluated and analyzed for better business efficiency. The three ways of using the software would be analyzing the buying and expenses habits of the customers through the usage of the data collected related to their deposits and withdrawals. The ATM or debit card provides all the details about the spending of the customer to the bank through the software which would be used by the analytics team to draw proper inferences and understand the psychology of the customer. This would help the bank to be innovative with the products and develop new products which would enhance the spending habit of the customer. The bank would develop new schemes and discount offers through this data and attracts customer to spend more. The software would be useful to analyze the data of the loan disbursement and number of defaulters which reduces the profits and revenues of the bank. The bank could be alert about the financial position of the customer requesting for the loan and analyze the complete situation and status of the department for making strategic decisions about the investments of the cash deposits of all the branches. The third possible way is to analyze the operational cost and develop the software in such a manner that it reduces the time efforts but still manage to deliver better results than earlier.
6. Evaluate the level of efficiency of the technology implementation:
The ERP solutions provided by all the vendors or service providers in the market focus on improving the efficiency of all the business activities executed in every department of the bank. The technology would help the banking sector and every bank to streamline the data and store them on a better platform wherein it could be accessed by all the departments which have the authority and request. The technology would reduce the human interference and reduce the number of errors done by the employees in many instances and activities while executing them regularly. The time duration would also be reduced for many activities which would increase the performance and efficiency level of all those activities in every department. The technology would make the process and activities easier for the candidates to perform and impact their performance level. The implementation wouldn’t derive immediate results but sure will i the long run which would be a win situation for the banks.
The Bank of Queensland is implementing a new ERP solution which is expected to impact the performance level of all the employees in every respective department. When we speak about the level of efficiency of the technology, we would focus on the implementation and execution level of the technology in all the departments of the bank. The technology would provide a huge cloud platform for storing and extracting of the data which would focus on the storage as well as the security aspect of the data. The technology would connect all the departments through the system which would improve the coordination level and transfer the required information to respective departments within the time frame and accurately. This would improve the analytical results for the bank and help to accurately understand the requirements and needs of the customer and develop a new product.
7. Examine potential security risks, data breaches:
The customer details and financial transactions are the crucial data held by all the banks which they need to protect from getting stolen through insider employees or professional hackers. The disclosure of this data to the competitors or unethical thieves could jeopardize the financial position of the customers and hamper the image and position of the bank in the market. This data could easily be stolen through the systems, mobile applications or camera by the employees or through the use of the internet by the external hacker. All the banks are dealing in money every second of the day and there is a potential risk of this money could be stolen by the employees or hackers using some unethical systems or software. There is a possible threat of competitors using the classified information of the customers to approach them and make them their customers and use their services.
The Bank of Queensland could possess the threat or security risk just like any other bank does. But the impact or result of such risk would be very high since it is one of the largest banks in Australia. There is a chance that any employee might use unethical ways to record the details of the customers and perform illegal activities and steal money from the customer’s account. The cashiers collect and dispense money on a regular basis and if they don’t record or misrepresent the accounts, then there are high chances of them stealing the cash from the respective branches and impacting the overall financial value of the bank. The data of the customers on the cloud platform is exposed to the risk of getting hacked by unethical hackers and sell it to the competitors or misuse it for personal gains.
8. Provide guidelines on how these risks could be mitigated.
The risks are high and hence the strategies and methods to mitigate them should be highly effective and impactful. Every bank normally opt for an antivirus installed in all the systems of all the branches to ensure that it is not affected by any virus attack and it is stopped by the antivirus before it hit the systems. The banks and other sector organizations would ensure they create a firewall before any threat affects the systems and indicate the entry of the threat before it corrupts the data and the systems.
The Bank of Queensland need to first of all conduct the security training for all the employees so that they know the rules and compliances related to the usage of the technology and the effect of misuse. The employees should go through this type of training every quarterly so that in case any changes or alternation or advancement arises during the past quarter could be informed to the employees and other associated people. There should be a proper system under which the candidate would be expected to change the password every month. The employees should be informed about the consequences of non-adherence to the compliances. The bank should have a proper firewall placed in the system in order to get prior information before the system is corrupted with any threat or virus. The bank should also focus on updating their systems and focus on maintenance on a regular basis so that the system doesn’t get out dated and impact the performance. The Bank of Queensland would also install highly effective antivirus software which would at least indicate the type of threat and possible solutions to avoid the impact and protect from suffering loss.
Conclusion:
The Banking sector is one of the booming sectors in the country due to flow of money in the market. Hence, they are vulnerable to such threats and risks from external as well as internal factors. The ERP system is the backbone of many organizations and banks due to its influence and effectiveness in improving the performance and efficiency in every business process. The bank performs enormous business activities in traditional manner through their branches as well as online due to boom in the internet sector. This also improved the marketing strategy development process and helps to analyse the impact of the advertising and other marketing activities on the customers.
