1 July 2009

More effective separation of business and IT responsibilities can speed up document composition-related processes and reduce time to market, says Paul Dirven.

Large businesses, such as banks and insurers, have seen the customer loyalty that they once took for granted decrease significantly over recent years. Attracting and retaining customers has become an increasingly competitive business that demands rapid communication of new products and service enhancements, before the customer can be tempted by another offer. However, for many organisations the current division of responsibilities between IT and business departments, as well as the trend towards reducing costs by outsourcing IT operations, can have an adverse effect on customer communications.

Product ideas are developed in the part of the company where the core activities are performed – the business, or the marketing and sales departments. This is where the market knowledge resides and money is made, and these people know how quickly and decisively they need to react to market changes. But banking products generally consist of a set of documents – brochures, policies, invoices and terms and conditions – which are put together and personalised automatically by IT systems. Often, the content of these documents can only be modified by the IT department, and this can mean delays in the implementation of changes.

A focus on integrating IT and business often leads to complicated interaction between the two departments

Paul Dirven, Aia Software One problem is that even planned modifications are often swept aside in favour of purely IT-related tasks such as ensuring the availability and performance of the IT infrastructure. While business continuity issues are the top priority in IT activities, it is difficult for the IT department to estimate the importance of a particular change to the business. Add in the time differences and communication issues involved with an outsourced IT department, and it’s easy to see why for many financial firms, the time to market of new products or services is getting longer rather than shorter.

Significant geographical distance between the business and its IT department can make it much more complicated to realise innovations and changes in customer documentation because any proposed changes need to be recorded in as much detail as possible, and requests often pass through a number of hands. Core departments, such as marketing and sales, must describe their requirements very precisely and at a technical level, but knowledge can also be lost in this transfer of information, and in some cases it can take up to six months to implement changes to documentation.

Various methods have been used to address this issue, with some key differences emerging. In general, businesses in the US focus on technology, while European companies look to integrate business and IT. Both of these approaches bring challenges. A focus on optimising technology, often on a single advanced platform that combines the whole communication infrastructure including document composition processes, requires a lot of expertise which, in practice, resides in the IT department. However, a focus on integrating IT and business often leads to complicated interaction between the two departments, so the business is constantly ruled by priorities set by the IT department. In both of these cases, the business department can find it difficult to rapidly implement changes to documentation, and the problems are exacerbated when IT tasks are carried out in another part of the world.

Separating technology and content
A solution where outsourcing companies truly benefit is the separation of technology and content, so that communication tasks can be extracted in a responsible manner and assigned to the business in the country of origin – in other words, part of the communication with the customer is in-sourced. As far as technology is concerned, building effective document composition processes will enable the business to function independently of IT and adapt the content of documents itself. The role of the IT department therefore becomes a supervisory function, focused on maintaining levels of service and security.

In order to enable this solution from a technical point of view, a number of essential criteria must be satisfied. Good version management is key – if all parts of the correspondence are retained then it will be clear who did what, and when. The IT department can trace all actions, but the document composition system must be set up technically in such a way that people in various roles can use it. Flexible multi-user interactivity is essential – for example, one person processes the text-blocks, another takes care of the layout and a third supervises the authorisation of the correspondence. This requires a toolkit that can determine who is able and allowed to do what. For example, composing one document may really be a job for the sales department, while other things, such as general terms and conditions, are put together centrally by management.

Roles and privileges must therefore be clearly organised both across the organisation and within departments. The correct people and departments must be given the right responsibilities, with clear definition within departments in terms of who can implement changes and what are the necessary approval processes. This creates maximum flexibility in managing outgoing document composition and correspondence. These ‘business-empowered communications’ have a beneficial effect on the development of new products. By making its own changes to documents, the business can shorten the time to market of its products. Employees can also respond better to customers’ wishes because they can easily adapt documents and therefore answer specific questions. This not only increases the company’s competitive advantage, but also customer satisfaction.

According to this model, part of the pressure is transferred so that both business and IT departments can do what they do best. The IT department handles the performance and availability of the document composition application – a responsibility that computer programmers can now focus on directly, without being interrupted with questions about content. The business, meanwhile, can better assess the immediate necessity and time pressure of a requested change. Separating the responsibilities of business and IT in this way enables them to work together in the best way possible. Return on investment can be achieved in less than 12 months, so that banks and insurers can still see the business case for outsourcing their IT departments, while being able to quickly make any necessary changes to their correspondence.

Paul Dirven is chief executive officer of Aia Software.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Finance on Windows.

Add a comment