Recently at AMIFS, Scott Wise stated that a lack of integration in Finance is one of the biggest organizational challenges to transformation. The problem is that expense management functions have a common goal of cost reduction or prevention, but too often these functions are competitive and disparate across the organization. Does this lack of integration cause a problem for your organization. Is there any benefit to keeping the functions competitive?
April 29, 2008 at 5:34 pm
I found this case study on First Commercial Bank in Taiwan. It outlines some of the project challenges that had to be overcome. Is this really the norm?
“Data was stored in 19 disparate programs, creating quality issues and making it extremely difficult for staff to access information. To retrieve data, staff had to call on the bank’s IT department to access the relevant system. Information was outdated by the time it reached senior staff, which hampered business management.
To make matters worse, reporting parameters were fixed, so there was no way for staff to create ad hoc reports based on specific queries. The IT department had to reprogram the system if new reports were required; a time-consuming task that created unwanted downtime.
Maintenance was also a problem. When the original programmers left the company, it usually took a long time for their successors to become familiar with the system, making management increasingly difficult.”