Making Sense of Governance, Risk, Compliance and Sustainability

Website problems are a major cause of complaints to the financial ombudsman

admin — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 18:04:56 +0000

User experience projects at large financial websites are in part an answer to consumer complaints about websites that handle data inefficiently or incorrectly and sometimes illegally.

The Event Driven Architecture (EDA) approach is complementary to SOA, which IT vendors employ to develop Web services. Supporting the ‘real-time’ enterprise needs an infrastructure based on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), combined with event handling capabilities that can automatically provide information delivery about incidents taking place for interested processes, services, applications, and middleware.

The majority of processes are event-driven, requiring a trigger to be initiated – be that calendar-based, by some form of communication, or a cause. The importance of events within a process context makes the messaging infrastructure an integral component of the IT architecture and one that interacts with multiple layers in an enterprise IT stack.

EDA supports parallel asynchronous flows of data event handling and has other characteristics that distinguish it from service processing. Events require one-to-one exchanges, and additional capability for one-to-many and many-to-many communications. In addition, event handling allows the interaction between systems to be decoupled, with the publisher and the subscriber not needing to know anything about each other.

Enterprise business processes and components are managed events, needing to be administered in a similar fashion, with functionality available for identifying, aggregating, and managing events in real-time. The pressure for IT to comply to privacy, safety and security requirements also means historical events should be available.

Asset Management – The easy part of green ICT

admin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 19:31:59 +0000

Most "green" initiatives reflect the corporate environmental policy, legislative mandates and the cost savings associated with reduced electrical consumption. Green IT initiatives, from an asset management perspective, tend to influence the procurement of selected hardware components that are labeled as operationally energy efficient and/or were manufactured with materials and processes that had minimized the impact on the environment. Consider regional, national and international regulations governing disposal and efficiencies, such as Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE), Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Eco-design Directive for Energy-Using Products (EuP), Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), Energy Star, and others.

The implications of Outcome based compliance for Information Technology

admin — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 13:33:11 +0000

New compliance tutorial on 'The implications of Outcome based compliance for Information Technology' available at http://bit.ly/bb6gbR . PDF available on request from this site – Please use the Contact Form.

New bank with a head start

admin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:45:32 +0000

The new bank to jostle on the consumer high street in the uk is the metro.

http://www.metrobankonline.co.uk/

offering 'unparalleled levels of service' and ICT that will deliver a new customers account, cards and so on within 15 minutes presumably using a clean design of systems and standards that truly takes advantage of advances in computing.

If the metro bank also has the holy grail of a single view of the customer then it will be able to tailor its customer service much better than the norm and make talking to them less exasperating from the client point of view.

Most unlike the established banks that actually still use mainframe applications from the last century that are too risky to reengineer, along with the spaghetti of self made programs that they have invested in over the years, the many databases that dont add up correctly and are difficult to audit and secure with the payload of expensive compliance management - How long can they sustain that ?