Challenges - are they really challenging?
There is economic slow down across the world. Large global banks today are trying to cut down on costs by outsourcing heavily to India. This has resulted into having multiple vendors doing multiple contracts within a Line of business. A typical strategy adopted by these institutes is to have few global vendors, few local vendors and keep them competing with each other. This way they get the best of both worlds, highly reliable and predictable output from the global vendors and niche technology skills from the local vendors. The challenge however begins when the majority of application knowledge which resided within the bank resides with multiple vendors in pockets. Numerous contracts with various vendors also result in different operating levels and therefore conflicting priorities.
This hinders the bank from carrying out any strategic transformational projects to optimize the overlapping processes and also makes them less agile with respect to mobilizing the knowledge workers. This is a cause of worry for the banks especially with changing regulations and frequent compliance needs to the banking norms.
A detailed documentation on each of the application can ensure that the knowledge resides within the bank and dependency on a particular vendor is reduced. The key benefit however is realized when the banks are able to reduce the overlap between processes and are able to operate efficiently. The results could bring benefits in the magnitude of millions of dollars.
