Spun by IT "Miracles"
Technology should not be the driving tool in designing customer friendly products/processes. I say this with some level of confidence because of the disasters we have seen and had to fix. Financial services executives are fully aware of the complexity involved in offering customers the best experience. To this end, several large banks & financial institutions have taken the path of imaging to facilitate information flow. Imaging can indeed be a powerful tool when incorporated within an intelligently designed process. Alternatively, this can turn into a nightmare if organizations fail to conduct appropriate due diligence on their process capability before choosing an imaging partner.
At a highly anticipated Loan Operations conference, I attended a presentation by a vendor for an imaging software solution. What the presenter showed attendees was very exciting in its potential for delivering incremental efficiencies. Imagine eliminating data entry redundancies, missing data points, copying/faxing/emailing...reducing human errors and time required to transfer information.
What the presenter FAILED to do was inform everyone in the room of this simple fact: To gain full benefit from this software the user would have to first design an efficient process and then incorporate the IT solution. The software solution, as presented, would not magically fix broken processes; rather it would incorporate all inefficiencies into the NEWLY digitized flow.
The scenario I describe above is one that I see increasingly as I survey the marketplace. And to be frank, I find gross misrepresentations of the true capabilities inherent in certain software packages. No software can think for you, no software can redesign a poor flow. And while imaging can offer many benefits to financial organizations needing to share customer information among multiple sites, one stark reality remains: the imaging software will simply render the hard-copy information into a digitized format. So, if you have an old process to get your loan application from the broker through committee, underwriting…. The imaging software will replicate that old process. It will not tell you where you have opportunity for reducing errors, where there is risk of missing critical information…you get my point. Caveat emptor!
