Time to weed the garden: How to keep the tech that works
Anyone with a garden at the end of the season knows about sprawl. It’s the rare gardener who hasn’t overplanted and found their plot, bed or raised garden to be a mess to look at, overflowing to the point of causing harm to high-value plants or even the long-term productivity of the garden.
When there’s too much in the garden, plants lose the freedom to grow without being held back.
So it goes with IT sprawl and its unwelcome outcome: disparate systems that don’t work efficiently or together.
Leaders in the financial industry see this. Eighty-three percent of executives think their companies have silos, according to MIBAR.net. And 97 percent of them think silos are having a negative effect on business.
It’s time to dig into the overgrown garden of your IT sprawl and start culling problematic tech.
Yes, you may have once wanted some of it — needed pieces of it, even — but now is not the time to spend precious resources on tech that hasn’t grown the way you need it to. Here’s how to get your hands dirty and start pulling out unhelpful tech.
Identify noxious data silos
Data silos are a common legacy of first-generation content services. It used to be that core banking systems, document management systems, regulation and compliance software, HR solutions and customer communications management software, to name a few, provided actual solutions for specific problems.
The outdated gauntlet of technology of first-generation content services is simply too cumbersome and ineffective.
But those patchwork solutions created an ecosystem of disparate systems that don’t bring important content together for a complete view. From investor onboarding and loan document tracking to being mobile-ready and providing unparalleled service, today’s evolving market for enterprise-wide solutions proves the outdated gauntlet of technology of first-generation content services is simply too cumbersome and ineffective.
A modern, foundational content services platform doesn’t just patch niche inefficiencies. It provides the infrastructure to bring every piece of data and content together, in one place, for a complete view and unlimited opportunities for accelerated business processes.
Embrace “less is more” with an eye on performance
It used to be that when a business process inefficiency arose, savvy leaders found a way to fix it with a software solution. And when another cropped up, that would get its own solution, too.
That is the thinking of a time before comprehensive content services. It made sense at the time, but it’s led many financial institutions to where they are now: too much tech that instead of bringing people and processes together, actually silos them.
Today, high-performing financial institutions look to future-proof with smart tech like a content services platform, which creates bridges to all technology solutions (or replaces outdated ones), deploys intelligent automation and delivers a host of capabilities, including:
- Regulation technology (RegTech)
- Intelligent capture
- Case management
- Workflow and business process management
- Enterprise search and file sync and share
Look for companion tech — i.e., top-tier integrations
Your IT team is talented. It doesn’t have to burn down the system and start over, but instead, it can evaluate each component.
Does it work in today’s business environment?
Does it communicate with other integral technology components?
Do users leverage it easily and to its full advantage?
Does it give you an edge in the competition for high-net-worth individuals?
Much like a garden with too many preciously collected plants, when your financial enterprise has collected too many disparate solutions — no matter the intent of their implementation — there can be unexpected losses.
When your overgrown tech space includes important data that can impact your customer care goals, bottom line and employee productivity, lost data matters. By trimming back on underperforming solutions and replacing them with foundational technology infrastructure, you give space for your enterprise to grow responsibly, collaboratively and with a strategy for the future.
Ready to get into the weeds about IT sprawl? Download the infographic Data silos and how to destroy them.
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