TRANSFORMATION TOWARDS CUSTOMER-ORIENTED SERVICE ARCHITECTURES IN THE FINANCIAL INDUSTRY

The financial industry is in midst of a global transformation. Drivers for this are changes in customer behaviour, disruptive power of information technology and changes in the industry structure itself. These developments have the potential to shift the financial industry towards a customer-oriented financial market infrastructure and force banks to become more customer-oriented. The research presented here applies an integrated approach on service-oriented architectures (SOA) which combines a business and technological view on services and thus contributes to the emerging field of service science. The paper develops a customer-oriented service architecture model for banks and analyzes the impact of future banking sales and distribution by a quantitative survey. Data was collected from 25 banks in the German-speaking area. The empirical results of hypotheses testing indicate that banks have only started to restructure their existing architectures, but will not be customer-oriented in 2015. However, first tendencies show that banks concentrate on the extension of core competencies in e-channels to better and more cost efficiently serve their customers. Nevertheless, the developments planned until 2015 neglect necessary enhancements of banks` service architectures such as the inte-gration of value added services from external service providers or the centralization of processes in all customer-facing services

The Management of Manufacturing-Oriented Informatics Systems Using Efficient and Flexible Architectures

Industry and in particular the manufacturing-oriented sector has always been researched and innovated as a result of technological progress, diversification and differentiation among consumers' demands. A company that provides to its customers products matching perfectly their demands at competitive prices has a great advantage over its competitors. Manufacturing-oriented information systems are becoming more flexible and configurable and they require integration with the entire organization. This can be done using efficient software architectures that will allow the coexistence between commercial solutions and open source components while sharing computing resources organized in grid infrastructures and under the governance of powerful management tools.Manufacturing-Oriented Informatics Systems, Open Source, Software Architectures, Grid Computing, Web-Based Management Systems

Seeing the big PICTURE: A framework for improving the communication of requirements within the Business-IT relationship

The relationship between the business and IT departments in the context of the organisation has been characterised as highly divisive. Contributing problems appear to revolve around the failure to adequately communicate and understand the required information for the alignment of business and IT strategies and infrastructures. This study takes a communication-based view on the concept of alignment, in terms of the relationship between the retail business and IT within a major high street UK bank. A research framework (PICTURE) is used to provide insight into this relationship and guide the analysis of interviews with 29 individuals on mid-high management level for their thematic content. The paper highlights the lessons that can be derived from the study of the BIT relationship and how possible improvements could be made

Service-based Integration of IT-Innovations in Customer-Bank-Interaction

Numerous information technology (IT)-based innovations from automated teller machines to electronic banking have already changed the customer-bank-interaction. Banks learned that these innovations require close integration with the existing channels, processes and systems in the front as well as in the backend. In view of a still dynamic pace of technological evolution, this research provides an overview of existing innovations in banking which have more recently spread especially in Germany and Switzerland. Based on these examples a framework is developed for vertically and horizontally integrating these innovations in existing architectures in banking

Business process management tools as a measure of customer-centric maturity

In application of business process management (BPM) tools in European commercial sectors, this paper examines current maturity of customer centricity construct (CC) as an emerging dimension of competition and as a potential strategic management direction for the future of business. Processes are one of the key components of transformation in the CC roadmap. Particular departments are more customer orientated than others, and processes, customer-centric expertise, and approach can be built and utilized starting from them. Positive items within a current business process that only involve minor modification could be the basis for that. The evidence of movement on the customer-centric roadmap is found. BPM in European telecommunications, banking, utility and retail sector supports roadmap towards customer-centricity in process view, process alignment and process optimization. However, the movement is partial and not flawless, as BPM hasn’t been inquired for supporting many of customer-centric dimensions

Multi Agent Systems in Logistics: A Literature and State-of-the-art Review

Based on a literature survey, we aim to answer our main question: “How should we plan and execute logistics in supply chains that aim to meet today’s requirements, and how can we support such planning and execution using IT?†Today’s requirements in supply chains include inter-organizational collaboration and more responsive and tailored supply to meet specific demand. Enterprise systems fall short in meeting these requirements The focus of planning and execution systems should move towards an inter-enterprise and event-driven mode. Inter-organizational systems may support planning going from supporting information exchange and henceforth enable synchronized planning within the organizations towards the capability to do network planning based on available information throughout the network. We provide a framework for planning systems, constituting a rich landscape of possible configurations, where the centralized and fully decentralized approaches are two extremes. We define and discuss agent based systems and in particular multi agent systems (MAS). We emphasize the issue of the role of MAS coordination architectures, and then explain that transportation is, next to production, an important domain in which MAS can and actually are applied. However, implementation is not widespread and some implementation issues are explored. In this manner, we conclude that planning problems in transportation have characteristics that comply with the specific capabilities of agent systems. In particular, these systems are capable to deal with inter-organizational and event-driven planning settings, hence meeting today’s requirements in supply chain planning and execution.supply chain;MAS;multi agent systems