In an industry confronted by increasing regulation and stiff competition, players in financial services have been bombarded by a series of buzzwords, catch phrases and acronyms. After years of careful observation, one might argue the money's in the acronym, not in what the acronym actually means.
Take CRM, for example. While everyone knows it stands for customer relationship management, few firms can articulate how they intend to derive benefits once they become acquainted with either the catch phrase or acronym. The drumbeat for CRM has grown so loud that the industry became swept up in a technology spending spree.
Ditto for things like J2EE and Web services, neither of which bank CIOs and their IT shops can rationalize for the business side.
The call for ROI is creating similar distraction. Is it reasonable to expect a return on a technology investment in three to six months? Does-or should-it differ by project? By channel? And what if the technology implementation effects multiple channels? CIOs have one answer, CFOs another. And the business folks are caught somewhere in the middle.
The answer lies in an institution's commitment to decipher where its business lines stand, what growth opportunities exist (if any) and how technology will enable those business objectives.
In truth, it requires knowing what the limits and potentials are for all technologies-and recognition that a spit-and-glue approach is, at best, a short-term solution, and, at worst, a wasteful use of limited resources.
That can only lead to yet another useless acronym, and millions of technology dollars wasted along the way.
