Financial Institution Advantage and the Optimization of Information Processing

Chapter 7A Higher Level of Integration

Most of the foregoing discussion focused on the physical aspects of data and information processing and on the human capital requirements of managing those physical processes. However, while these core competencies are fundamental to supporting a more competitive product and service stack, the physical processing infrastructure can be viewed as nested in multiple superstructures. These include a finance and accounting view of the firm, a risk view of the firm, various process views, and a meta-information view (a view of the firm's infrastructure), all of which are required to manage the firm's operations. Processes for which it may be helpful to actively manage the information-creating infrastructure include financial disclosures, capital planning and stress testing, internal performance measurement, customer marketing programs, and others. These critical processes span multiple information flows, infrastructure components, and organization subgroups, and holistic management of them requires the ability to see and assess all of the critical core and supporting subprocesses, inputs, and infrastructure. To obtain these more integrated views of the institution's operations requires a significant amount of cross-functional knowledge pooling as well as some specialized tools and techniques.

Alternate Views of Integration

Most of the discussion presented so far has focused on the physical management of data, and the processing flow of data ...