Despite the slow adoption of cloud computing by the banking and financial services industry with security and reliability being the major concerns, financial institutions are quickly resorting to cloud-based services to achieve increased agility and lowered total cost of ownership (TCO). According to IDC, worldwide revenue from public IT cloud services exceeded $21.5 billion in 2010 and is expected to reach $72.9 billion in 2015. There is an emerging trend in which financial institutions are embracing “cloud solutions” as not just a ‘me-too’ option, but as solutions that yield competitive advantage due to shorter cycles of time to market for products and services. (more…)

Enterprises are beginning to realize that an effective Enterprise Content Management (ECM) roadmap, if preceded by evaluation, strategy and goals, can lead to many enterprise-level business benefits. However, to prevent ECM oversight, it is imperative to have a governance body in place to help establish a strategy which in turn results in clear operating plans.

ECM governance helps organizations ensure smooth ECM implementations which not only meet business and technical requirements, but also equip organizations with valid and reliable documents, records and content which help them make the right decisions quickly. Additionally, ECM governance ensures the integrity of an organization’s information. It’s also important to keep in mind that ECM Governance is perpetual and lives until the ECM system lives. (more…)

‘Social’ is clearly at the top of the hyper curve. What does this really mean to businesses? Why should an organization think about social? There are a few fundamental shifts that are making a significant impact in the way businesses are run today. First is the growing Gen Y workforce that is highly active on social platforms. A BPW Foundation’s Gen Y study published in April 2011 noted that by 2025, Generation Y will make up roughly 75% of the world’s workforce. Second is about customers and competition. Rapid globalization and technology are shrinking the world at an unprecedented rate. Essentially this means that if you are unable to adapt and innovate at a fast pace, it is very likely that another company will, and potentially steal your customers. Is your organization in sync with these fundamental shifts in the way employees, customers and competition collaborate, interact and engage? (more…)

Social Media is causing a paradigm shift in the way customers interact with companies, given the evolution of direct communicative relationships between them. Customers today stay motivated to participate in ‘social’ forums, making it mutually beneficial.

Does this mean that a company that has 25,000 likes on its Facebook page and 10,000 followers on its Twitter account is successful? Not necessarily. The above figures just indicate customers’ interest to be a part of the community. This interest however, is a huge opportunity!

True success is when you adopt a strategic approach to tap digital marketing opportunities, create avenues to engage with customers, make them like your product/service and indulge in word-of-mouth promotion. However, it is not as simple as just setting up a Facebook page or a LinkedIn group. (more…)

The healthcare Industry as a whole is currently weighing its options after the recent announcement by Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius that the federal government may extend the October 2013 ICD-10 implementation deadline.

As of right now, no one knows what the time frame for the extension would be or who would be exempt from the exception. In addition, ICD-11 is fast approaching and expected to be implemented around 2015, just a year away if the industry were granted a one-year extension for ICD-10. This begs the question, if companies delay ICD-10 implementations now, how will they be ready for ICD-11? There are multiple options to weigh, which I will discuss in this blog post. (more…)

Responsive layouts, adaptive layouts, media queries and viewports are terms that are no longer new to the tech savvy generation of today. There exists a burgeoning trend where websites are creating mobile friendly versions to adapt to the relatively smaller mobile screens. Responsive web design (RWD), thus proves to be an emerging user interface design approach which may play an important role in the coming years.

RWD increases the adaptability of applications enabling them to run on various platforms (smartphone, a tablet or a laptop/desktop). It maintains code base and automatically re-engineers the layouts to suit the device used. This helps reduce duplication of efforts and maximizes productivity and operational efficiency. (more…)

Financial services firms globally are investing strategically in enterprise mobile financial service solutions to deliver more mobile-based banking services and reduce the overall cost of operations. According to a recent survey by KPMG, mobile banking has already reached critical mass with 33% of US consumers conducting banking transactions over their mobile devices. This number is expected to significantly increase based on several trends. First of all, more consumers are becoming comfortable with the security of executing mobile transactions. Second is the continued penetration of smart phones and third is the rapid emergence of tablets as both a mobile device and in many circumstances, a replacement for standard desktops/laptops. (more…)