Invest in Integrated Service Management for Banking to improve operational visibility, control, and automation

Banks face daunting service management challenges

Service Management in Action Banks today are in the midst of tremendous change. The business climate in the financial sector has been, since 2008, challenging to say the least, and as a result, banks face a number of significant complexities going forward:

Integrating their operations. When different operations teams and infrastructures are combined—often as a result of a merger or acquisition—banks must find a way to integrate operations transparently, in order to ensure that business goals are continually met and the customer experience is seamless.
Securing their operations. Customers expect financial services to be rock-solid and absolutely secure. When those expectations are not met, customers may well choose to do business with another bank.
Complying with regulatory change. Around the world, governments are responding to increasing economic pressure by enacting new regulations designed to mitigate or eliminate many forms of business risk. Banks must comply with these regulations, and for global banks, the complexity of this issue is multiplied by every nation in which they do business.
Defending/expanding market share. In a cloudy economy, banks must seek ways to preserve the client base by maximizing their business resiliency, as well as increase that client base by offering compelling new services. In both respects, energy efficiency is an important consideration and opportunity to optimize; green data centers are not only more resilient, but less expensive, which frees revenues for innovative development.

How can banks best solve these problems?

One promising approach lies in enhancing their service management—that is, aligning the services they provide as closely as possible with the services their customers need and want the most. Service management, however, implies different ramifications in different industries. Each industry will require a custom implementation.

For this reason, at Pulse 2009, IBM unveiled a set of industry-specific service management offerings—and among them was Integrated Service Management for Banks. This modular suite of best-in-class IBM solutions empowers banks to enhance their service management by improving operational visibility (tracking changes in real-time), control (making adjustments to suit and achieving regulation compliance) and automation (accelerating everyday tasks and processes across silos by automating them).

And as part of the IBM Banking Framework launch on September 15th of last year, Integrated Service Management for Banking was significantly updated, increasing its value proposition even more via powerful new features and functions.

Integrate operations to render IT a more efficient and cost-efficient engine of business services

“This modular suite of best-in-class IBM solutions empowers banks to enhance their service management by improving operational visibility (tracking changes in real-time), control (making adjustments to suit and achieving regulation compliance) and automation (accelerating everyday tasks and processes across silos by automating them).” As previously suggested, the rapid rate at which banks are conducting mergers and acquisitions is introducing many new challenges—particularly with respect to how they integrate operations.

When two distinct operational infrastructures blend, it becomes harder to get a holistic perspective on how systems are performing at any given technological layer (service, network, software or device). How can bottlenecks be eliminated when team members can't rapidly and accurately determine where those bottlenecks are?

Furthermore, overlapping tools or solutions may be in place, and if so, these must be identified and consolidated. Banks may wish to improve the customer experience, but this requires first establishing and quantifying that experience. And because different technical problems affect that customer experience differently, it's important to solve problems in a prioritized way.

Integrated Service Management for Banking includes many powerful, modular solutions banks can combine as required to resolve these and other complexities. For instance: toward discovering the IT infrastructure, establishing the logical relationships among assets, and isolating technical issues, one excellent solution is IBM Tivoli Netcool, which helps by delivering a bird's eye view of the IT infrastructure. Technicians can simply drill down into it, at any necessary level of abstraction, to pinpoint problems and initiate a rapid and effective response.

Should users experience problems, IBM Tivoli Service Request Manager delivers a complete range of trouble-ticket reporting functionality. This tool also incorporates a service catalog element that can reduce costs, in the event that a user already knows exactly what's wrong, by allowing them to request a particular service.

In the domain of asset management, IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT helps managers determine exactly which assets they have, establish their status/health levels, and make any necessary adjustments to obtain a better ROI at every stage of the asset lifecycle. Also helpful as a mechanism of enhanced ROI: IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager, a cost-tracking tool that can quantify the costs generated by IT at any required logical layer, from applications to services to business projects to organizational teams, enabling subsequent chargeback on that basis.

Security and compliance management help you comply with regulations and protect core data and services

Few fields require such stringent corporate governance and extensive regulation compliance as banking.

Banks must obviously comply fully with all existing regulations; as new ones are released, those too must be acknowledged procedurally and systemically. Security breaches capable of interrupting services, changing data, or accessing account information can easily lead to lost revenues, downtime, and diminished brand strength. And banks would do well to take into account both the threats from outside the organization, such as malware and criminal activity, as well as the threats from within, such as fraud committed by trusted insiders with special access privileges.

Bundled as part of the Integrated Service Management for Banking offering are many best-in-class solutions banks can leverage to proactively mitigate such threats (or even preclude them, in certain circumstances).

Consider IBM Tivoli Identity Manager, IBM Tivoli Access Manager, and IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager; these three tools can act in concert to create an identity foundation of users, create and update security policies to govern their activity alone and in logical groups, and even map different identity pools logically to each other (especially helpful in the case of a bank extending financial services beyond company walls).

IBM Tivoli Compliance Insight Manager directly addresses the problem of potentially fraudulent user activity by monitoring users in real-time and displaying their actions on an executive dashboard against security policies and government regulations. This tool can also generate reports, from a large and customizable library on demand, to illustrate compliance has been achieved should an audit take place.

And IBM Tivoli Security Operations Manager monitors the infrastructure continually by aggregating and analyzing security logs from disparate solutions. Should a breach or intrusion be detected, the tool will then generate a configurable response, such as alerting appropriate team members of the problem via e-mail and including all information related to it.

Optimize payment systems and improve the business bottom line

Payment systems comprise a third major obstacle for banks on the road to improved overall service management. The more complex payment systems are, the higher the costs to the banks will be—and in today's interconnected, interdependent financial reality, they are becoming more complex and more expensive every day.

Better business results require a simplified payment process which is, at the same time, more secure and more regulation-compliant. And given an optimized solution of this type, many other benefits are likely to accrue as well, such as the opportunity to support innovative business models, increase integration with partner systems, and respond in a more agile fashion to mergers and acquisitions.

Integrated Service Management for Banking delivers:

Time savings of 20-40%, thanks to streamlined, simplified processing
Cost reductions of up to 15-20% in key areas
Faster time to market, reduced risk of failure to comply with regulations, and enhanced business monitoring and management

Empowering such positive change is a diverse suite of IBM offerings drawn from the Tivoli service management portfolio. Collectively, these offerings improve process transparency, tracking, security and monitoring; third-party integration via open standards; rapid application development and integration; process flexibility; and automation (which diminishes the chance of human error while also improving performance).

Increase business resilience via energy-efficient data centers

Data centers in many organizations are already at a tipping point—and banks are no exception. Originally built for far fewer servers, to support far fewer and much less complex services, data centers are often cost sinkholes characterized by startling energy inefficiency.

Consider, for example, Gartner's observation that at present, 70% of data centers cannot meet adequate power requirements. Match that with IDC's observation that 80% of server capacity is excess, and the picture painted as a result is a bleak one. Much too often, data centers today simply draw too much power, generate too much heat, and create too little business value.

Fortunately, IBM's deep and proven expertise in green IT is showcased in the Integrated Service Management for Banking offering, which incorporates leading tools specifically designed to help organizations go green.

IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management delivers a complete perspective on energy utilization for all assets, across both facilities and IT, under a single pane of glass. Furthermore, information obtained from this solution can be routed to other solutions to create actionable intelligence and thus spur optimization projects. It can, for instance, be routed to IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager (to illustrate the different energy costs associated with different projects or assets, and authorize appropriate chargeback), or IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager (to correlate changes in energy utilization with business impact, and spur a prioritized response on that basis). And any data center in which virtualization is used to migrate services across systems in accordance with real-time workloads, to maximize energy efficiency, is likely to benefit from IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager, which uses a library of disk images to create virtual servers with exceptional speed and consistency.

Finally, it bears pointing out that IBM itself is a happy customer of its own energy efficiency solutions. IBM's Project Big Green bears the proof of that: for a typical data center of 25,000 square feet, IBM's experience has been that cost savings can easily exceed a million dollars annually.