Financial services companies face an array of demanding and ongoing challenges—global competition, mergers, acquisitions, converging service offerings, and an imperative to build and maintain customer loyalty. This white paper explores the landscape of operational risk in the financial services industry, and suggests ways an IBM Maximo IT asset management solution can reduce IT and operation risk while adding strategic benefits.
IBM asset and service management solutions White paper
IBM Maximo IT asset management solutions
in the financial services industry.
June 2007IBM Maximo IT asset management solutions in the financial services industry.2
Executive summaryContents Financial services companies face an array of demanding and ongoing challenges, including global competition, mergers, acquisitions, converging service offerings, 2 Executive summary and an imperative to build and maintain customer loyalty. 3 The strategic value of IT asset management At the same time, a growing array of compliance mandates, such as Sarbanes-3 IT asset management focus and Oxley and Basel II, require financial services companies to report and manage goals the operational risks they face-that is, the risk of financial losses resulting from 4 Addressing operational and IT risk "internal processes, people and systems, or from external events," as Basel II management defines it. This includes everything from errors in processing transactions to 5 IT asset management and cost physical threats to branches, ATMs and data centers. A significant component of efficiency operational risk is IT risk: the risk of operational losses resulting from IT systems 7 IT asset management and service and processes, including system downtime, data loss or theft, and software bugs. quality 7 Unifying IT asset and service The importance of managing IT risk continues to grow as financial services management organizations look to IT to help them improve service quality, enhance overall 9 IT asset management from IBM business agility and increase responsiveness to governance and compliance Maximo mandates-all while keeping a razor-sharp eye on IT costs. 12 A thoroughly modern architecture13 Beyond tracking assets Many financial services organizations are addressing these needs by consolidating 14 Managing assets throughout their systems and eliminating silos of information wherever possible. By taking a life cycle strategic approach to reducing IT complexity and improving reliability and 17 Ease of configuration manageability, companies can mitigate operational risk while boosting the return 18 Summary on IT investments. IT asset management is a cornerstone of this approach. 19 For more information This paper examines the landscape of operational risk from an IT perspective, 19 About Tivoli software from IBM and suggests ways in which an IT asset management solution can reduce IT risk while conferring strategic benefits. It concludes with a discussion of the ®capabilities of IBM Maximo Asset Management for IT from this perspective. IBM Maximo IT asset management solutions in the financial services industry.
The strategic value of IT asset managementHighlights Having grown over the years through mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and the addition of new service offerings, financial services companies have amassed a great diversity of IT hardware and software assets. These include legacy systems supporting core banking services, along with newer, add-on systems to support branch services, online banking and trading, ATM networks, and more.
In such complex environments, it can be exceedingly difficult and costly to obtain accurate asset data for analysis and reporting purposes related to mitigating operational risk. IT departments may also lack the asset data so essential for change and configuration management processes in support of improved service quality.
IT asset management focus and goalsIT asset management is concerned with all IT asset management is concerned with all inventory, financial and compliance inventory, financial and compliance functions related to the management of IT hardware and functions related to the management of IT hardware and software assets software assets throughout their life cycle. throughout their life cycle, as well as supporting strategic decision making related to IT asset costs, risks and compliance issues. This fundamental discipline empowers IT departments to optimize costs, improve service quality and credibility, and demonstrate business value. IT asset management goals include:
. Providing basic data about the inventory of enterprise IT hardware and software assets.. Tracking the locations of IT assets, as well as changes to their configurations.. Reducing costs by improving process efficiency and enabling better decisions about IT assets.. Improving IT al... [download for more]
