FinTech Vol 1 I 1

INR 70,000

FEATURES

TRENDS

OPNIONS

SURVEYS

DISCUSSIONS

LAUNCHES

New ISACA COSO Framework Guide Just Released

Enterprise Mobility is Shifting Financial Services CIOs to a New Model of IT

A new ICASA guide released indicates how the latest versions of the COSO Internal Control—Integrated Framework and COBIT relate to each other. This will help professionals who use both frameworks to create business value for enterprises in all industries and geographies. “Relating the COSO Internal Control— Integrated Framework and COBIT” looks at the updated COSO framework, which now includes a stronger emphasis on information technology, and examines the related COBIT 5 components. The paper outlines COBIT 5’s relationship to specific COSO principles and matches the relevant COBIT 5 framework content with the associated COSO framework concept.

COSO’s internal control framework helps management, boards of directors and others with their duties regarding

internal control. COBIT is used by enterprises worldwide to effectively govern and manage their information and technology. Recently, COBIT was included as an informative reference in the new US Cybersecurity Framework developed by NIST. “With the updates in the last couple of years of both COBIT and the COSO framework, many enterprises have been asking if the two are still complementary,” said Steven Babb, CGEIT, CRISC, ITIL, chair of the ISACA Framework Committee. “This paper answers that question with a resounding yes, and shows exactly how the two relate. By using both together, organizations can be confident that they are following proven guidance on assessing and improving their internal control practices within an effective governance structure.”

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Some Amazing Little Companies to Watch

“If you were to find a defect in Windows 8, then that defect probably exists backwards to other Windows versions,” note McAfee’s Adam Wosotowsky. “People can look at those patches and think, ‘What were they patching? I bet this same problem exists in XP, but it’s not patched because they’re no longer patching it.’ The security of an operating system drops off a cliff when support ends.”

As Microsoft prepares to cut off support for Windows XP, hackers are sharpening their knives in anticipation of carving up the operating system’s carcass. Web predators will pounce on XP 10 minutes after Microsoft pulls the support plug on the software, predicted one former military computer specialist and network engineer.

Indeed, it appears that information highwaymen are stockpiling ammunition for a series of assaults on the operating system.

Companies spend millions on advertising, and most of the money they spend is largely wasted.

Services like Google and Facebook have benefited because advertisers couldn’t determine where the value was. Kvantum could shift large amounts of revenue to where it could do more good - possibly away from Google and Facebook.

Financial Services are keeping up with the rapid adoption of new mobile devices and focusing on enduser productivity and convenience.A new study “The Changing Mobile Landscape in Financial Services,” mobile is presenting operational, governance, and timeto-market challenges that traditional IT approaches were not designed to address.The study surveyed over 400 IT professionals from financial services companies across all major sectors of the industry, including banking, insurance, and brokerage.

According to the study, 50 % respondents expects that majority of employees will be using business email and apps on mobile devices in the next 12 months.

Adoption of BYOD will also grow, with the percentage of personally owned smartphones and tablets in the organisation expected to increase from 40 percent to 49 percent in the same time period. Its also expected that use of BlackBerry in financial services will loose almost onethird of its market share over the next year with decrease to 30 percent from 44 percent.

However, only 38 percent of CIOs are confident that they can address the risks posed by smartphones and tablets.

This gap is not surprising, because these platforms are not always well understood by IT leadership, though this is certainly changing.

New risks will emerge for mobile, but many of the traditional vectors of data loss are mitigated by the sandboxed security architectures of mobile operating systems. At the same time, more than 50 percent of respondents believe their mobile strategy is either deficient or not aligned with IT and business priorities.

Although financial services organizations are rapidly expanding their mobile investments, there is a substantial disconnect between IT and the line-of-business on mobile priorities.

As part of the ability to maintain an effective mobile strategy over time, respondents rank agility and preparedness for change as the most important factor in a successful mobile strategy...

Clock Counting Down on Windows XP Support

Contd...on pg 5

INR 175,000

Develop your brand value...Share your experiences on www.fspro.in - the financial services knowledge sharing portal.

11 RISK

T

By Mary Shacklett

Ways To Reduce Decisions Risks

hese procurement strategies will reduce your risk when researching and selecting new IT solutions.

We all wish that there was a perfect solution for evaluating a vendor, besides the price point. We all need to know how to go about this.

However, there are very few few handbooks on how to select the right equipment, software and vendors; but this also is not necessarily right! These are areas that often vary from product to product service to service and fraught with errors and lawsuits.

So it is imperative to make a buying decision and partner well with vendors. However there are proven procurement strategies.

1. Call for the entire list of references Most sites ask their vendors for references and receive a hand-chosen three or four companies to call. Instead, request your vendor’s entire client list and make your own selected reference calls.

You’re likely to get more unvarnished opinions, which will help steer you to relevant question to ask a prospective vendor before you sign on the dotted line.

2. Request a “POC or limited implementation” No matter how comprehensive your due diligence is, the only way to really assess if a new solution is going to meet your needs is to try it in a pilot study at your company before you buy it.

If the solution does what you hope it can, you will feel more confident when you ink the contract.

3. Negotiate a contract with service level agreements

The contract should be very clearly articulated with cases that allow you to exit the contract (SLAs) and exit guidelines You and your prospective vendor should reach an agreement on service levels and how those levels will be measured.

Then, all parties should ensure that the SLA language is written into the contract before signing. This clarifies everyone’s understanding of performance expectations going into the agreement, and it gets your working relationship with the vendor off to a good start.

Also within the contract should be very clearly articulated cases that would allow you to exit the contract. This is an important point many sites miss, because they get so excited about signing the agreement that they think that nothing will ever go wrong.

Unfortunately, things happen. Your vendor might underperform, or your business needs might radically change, or there might be a change of management control at the vendor (such as the vendor being acquired) that you are uncomfortable with.

An exit clause allows you to leave a contract without fault or penalty if you have to.

Vendors often switch clients over to less experienced managers once the contract has been won and post initial implementation.

4. Vet for governance and business continuation Your vendor and its solution should meet or exceed your corporate requirements for IT governance and security. If there is noncompliance, your business is at risk.

Please perform a careful review of the vendor’s disaster recovery and business continuation plans and procedures.

5. Choose your project manager/account executive It is important to have a strong project manager/account executive while your new solution is being implemented; and it is equally important to continue to get strong project/ account management performance from the vendor after implementation.

Vendors often switch clients over to less experienced managers once the contract has been won and post initial implementation. As a result, sites may experience vendor service and response degradation.

Reserve the right to pre-approve any vendor project manager before the individual is assigned to you.

6. Have an options list of least three different vendors You need to know “what’s out there” when you are in

search of a particular IT solution. There is a tendency at times for sites to pre-select vendors without surveying the field; but taking a look at a number of solutions broadens your perspective, and helps you develop queries.

7. Be in the ‘KNOW’ of what you want Always engage all of the internal stakeholders in your company in a thorough definition of your business requirements before you go shopping for an IT solution.

Sometimes sites shortchange the requirements definition process, and find themselves instead listening to their vendors, which proceed to tell them what they need. N ever fall into this trap. Your business should always drive this process.

8. Learn your vendor’s culture Cultural compatibility is a prime driver of collaborative success between organizations. You should make it your upfront business to understand your vendor’s business culture, and whether it will mesh with your own. Cultural incompatibility can “break” any project—even if the

solution itself is good!

9. Obtain an upfront understanding on personnel recruitment It’s not uncommon for businesses to lose key employees to their vendors, or vice versa. Sometimes this creates hard feelings that impair business relationships. This is why many organizations have recruiting policies in place with their vendors that govern cross-hiring.

10. Review vendor’s upgrade and trade-up policies When you sign on to a solution, your CFO is likely to ask you for projected annual expenses. This is what makes it important to understand the vendor’s policies on product upgrades, how often they happen—and also whether the vendor will take in value for your older solution if you choose to upgrade.

11. Get opinions to help remove the visual blocks It will be important to get opinions from more than one professional in your product selection. This will allow for a perspective in aiding your decision making

Confidence

MOBILE

Mobile & Contactless Payments W

hilst we have all enjoyed the growth of acceptance of NFC based contactless payments for payment cards and smart phones, we cannot but help notice the people around us in either their payment behavior.

Paying with a tap of a phone still gets a look of bewilderment. That wouldn’t be such a worry if it were just from fellow shoppers, but it’s actually still from a lot of staff members behind the counter. Education and experience may solve this. But for many it’s still new-fangled and very gimmicky.And God forbid that there be an issue of any kind with a mobile payment because the panic sets in and alternative payment methods demanded immediately. Confidence is a huge issue in payments.

One of the best recent examples was a recent family vacation to Disneyland Paris with payment cards. For those of you that have been to Disneyland may be aware that they are pretty good with card acceptance. They accept MasterCard/ Maestro, Visa/ Carte Bleu, American Express and EuroCard. But Disneyland Paris has an exclusive partnership with MasterCard.

You will notice during your casual observation of countless transactions where the customer changed their payment cards at the counter, or awkwardly fumbled in their purse or wallets at the point of payment. Of course this was not scientific, or anything other than anecdotal, but was all caused by a little visual prompt: “MasterCard/ Maestro Always

Welcomed at Disneyland”.

This was just a poignant reminder to me, that customers will avoid the embarrassment of a transaction being declined. Not one person even brave the question of “do you accept XYZ?”.

It’s human nature to be compliant.

Consumers need confidence that their payment will just work. This is crucial to mobile payments. That’s what cash did. That’s what cards have done (unless the seed of doubt is shown). And poor acceptance, or poor experience really damage consumers trust and confidence. Payment failure is a huge consumer taboo, and therefore a huge source of anxiety.

Many of the new entrants are actively trying to eliminate the “awkwardness” of a payment transaction completely; citing the example of how in luxury stores the POS is out back, out of sight and not part of the payment experience.

So acceptance, and confidence in acceptance is a big part in trust (security and control INR 475 per sq cm aside). It’s not just about getting a consumer to try, it’s about creating a flawless and confidence building experience with every transaction.

Customer Experience is #1 CRM

A

ccording to a new IBM Study released today, over 60% of CIOs seek to improve customer experience and change the way they engage with customers.

More than 80% of CIOs surveyed

mc qs rep 574 RNI

are mining data for customer insights and shifting their focus to marketing, sales and customer service managers who work on finding, winning and retaining customers. Here’s a snapshot of how CIOs want to spend

more time on customer-related activities:

+2%: Marketing and Communications.

+15%: Customer experience management;

The report is based on face-toface conversations with more than 1,600 CIOs from 70 countries and 20 industries worldwide. The research, conducted by IBM’s

+6%: Sales and New Business Development;

Institute for Business Value, reveals that customers drive CIOs to turn their focus to the front lines. “The study validates the emerging reality that there is no longer any real distinction between the customer experience and contemporary business strategy,” said Peter Korsten, global leader, IBM Institute for Business Value. A number of additional CIO insights are available in this detailed report.

One of the most significant ways that IBM is blazing a trail for transforming customer insights into customer-activated business strategies was shared at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas.

Executives can monitor and use metrics from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and other social media to promote their brands and fine tune frontline service to meet customer needs in a more timely way.

IBM demonstrated its Digital Experience Platform which has the capability of tracking any and all social media metrics of a company in a Minority Reportstyle dashboard.

Leveraging technologies from partners like Mutual Mind, IBM displays a command center of powerful social media analytics that enable “Social Listening as a Service.” Executives can monitor and use metrics from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and other social media to promote their brands and fine tune frontline service to meet customer needs in a more timely way.

On average, a company needs to engage online customers within 5 seconds. Otherwise, 30% of potential customers leave and 40% never return. (source: Equation Research, 2010). One of the goals of the Digital Experience Platform is for companies to leverage social media metrics to become more agile with business decisions that reflect the sentiments of customers and employees.

Customer Experience metrics also enable companies to personalize products and services to meet and exceed customer expectations.

CRM

When Product Features Disappear

& a troubled tuture for 21st century consumers

O

ne of the great innovations of the 21st century are products that are cloud-connected and update and improve automatically. For software, gone are the days of having to buy a new version of physical media (disks or CD’s). For hardware, it’s the magical ability to have a product get better over time as features are automatically added.

The downside is when companies unilaterally remove features from their products without asking their customers permission and/or remove consumers’ ability to use the previous versions.

Products can just as easily be downgraded as upgraded.Loser It was a wake up call when Amazon did it with books, disappointing when Google did it with Google Maps, annoying when Apple did it to their office applications – but Tesla just did it on a $100,000 car.

It’s time to think about a 21st Century Bill of Consumer Product Rights.

Amazon – Down the Memory Hole In July 2009 facing a copyright lawsuit Amazon remotely deleted two books users had already downloaded and paid for on their Kindles. Amazon did so without notifying the users let alone asking their permission. It was a chilling reminder that when books and content are bits instead of atoms, someone can change the content – or simply disappear a book – all without users’ permission.

Google – Well It Looks Better In July 2013 Google completely redesigned Google Maps – and users discovered that on their desktop/laptop, the new product was slower than the one it replaced and features that were previously available disappeared. The new Google Maps was worse then one it replaced – except for one key thing – its User Interface was prettier and was unified across platforms. If design was the goal, then Google succeeded. If usability and functionality was a goal, then the new version was a step backwards.

Apple – Our Code Base is More Important than Your Features In November 2013 Apple updated its operating system and cajoled its customers to update their copies of Apple’s iWork office applications – Pages (Apple’s equivalent to Microsoft Word), Keynote (its PowerPoint equivalent), and Numbers (an attempt to match Excel). To get users to migrate from Microsoft Office and Google Docs, Apple offered these iWorks products for free.iwork Sounds great– who wouldn’t want the newest version of iWorks with the new OS especially at zero cost? But that’s because you would assume the new versions would have more features. Or perhaps given its new fancy user interface, the same features?

The last thing you would assume is that it had fewer features. Apple released new versions of these applications with key features missing, features that some users had previously paid for, used, and needed.

(Had they bothered to talk to customers, Apple would have heard these missing features were critical.)

But the release notes for the new version of the product had no notice that these features were removed. Their customers weren’t amused. Apple’s explanation?

“These applications were rewritten from the ground up, to be fully 64-bit and to support a unified file format between OS X and iOS 7 versions.” Translated into English this meant that Apple engineering recoding the products ran out of time to put all the old features back into the new versions. Apple

said, “… some features from iWork ’09 were not available for the initial release. We plan to reintroduce some of these features in the next few releases and will continue to add brand new features on an ongoing basis. Did they think no one would notice?

Decisions like this make you wonder if anyone on the Apple executive staff actually understood that a “unified file format” is not a customer feature. While these examples are troubling, up until now they’ve been limited to content or software products.

Tesla – Our Problems are Now Your Problems In November 2013 Tesla, a manufacturer of ~$70,000 to $120,000 electric cars, used a software “update” to disable a hardware option customers had bought and paid for – without telling them or asking their permission.

Tesla Model SOne of Tesla features is a $2,250 “smart air suspension” option that automatically lowers the car at highway speeds for better mileage and stability. Over a period of 5 weeks, three Tesla Model S cars had caught fire after severe accidents – two of them apparently from running over road debris that may have punctured the battery pack that made up the floor pan of the car. After the car fires Tesla pushed a software release out to its users. While the release notice highlighted new features in the release, nowhere did it describe that Tesla had unilaterally disabled a key part of the smart air suspension feature customers had purchased.

Only after most of Telsa customers installed the downgrade did Tesla’s CEO admit in a blog post, “…we have rolled out an overthe-air update to the air suspension that will result in greater ground clearance at highway speed.”

Translation – we disabled one of the features you thought you bought. (The CEO went on to say that another software update in January will give drivers back control of the feature.) The explanation of the nearly overnight removal of this feature was vague “…reducing the chances of underbody impact damage, not improving safety.” If it wasn’t about safety, why wasn’t it offered as a user-selected option?

One could only guess the no notice and immediacy of the release had to do with the National Highway Safety Administration investigation of the Tesla Model S car fires.

This raises the question: when Tesla is faced with future legal or regulatory issues, what other hardware features might Tesla remove or limit in cars in another software release? Adding speed limits? Acceleration limits? Turning off the Web browser when driving? The list of potential downgrades to the car is endless with the precedent now set of no obligation to notify their owners or ask their permission.

In the 20th century if someone had snuck into your garage and attempted to remove a feature from your car, you’d call the police.

In the 21st century it’s starting to look like the normal course of business.

What to Do While these Amazon, Google, Apple and Tesla examples may appear disconnected, taken together they are the harbinger of the future for 21st century consumers. Cloudbased updates and products have changed the landscape for consumers. The product you bought today may not be the product you own later.

Given there’s no corporate obligation that consumers permanently own their content or features, coupled with the lack

of any regulatory oversight of cloud-based products, Apple’s and Tesla’s behavior tells us what other companies will do when faced with engineering constraints, litigation or regulation. In each of these cases they took the most expedient point of view; they acted as if their customers had no guaranteed rights to features they had purchased. So problem solving in the corporate board room has started with “lets change the feature set” rather than “the features we sold are inviolate so lets solve the problem elsewhere.”

There’s a new set of assumptions about who owns your product. All these companies have crafted the legal terms of use for their product to include their ability to modify or remove features. Manufacturers not only have the means to change or delete previously purchased products at will, there’s no legal barrier to stop them from doing so.

The result is that consumers in the 21st century have less protection then they did in the 20th.What we can hope for is that smart companies will agree to a 21st Century Bill of Consumer Product Rights. What will

likely have to happen first is a class-action lawsuit establishing consumers’ permanent rights to retain features they have already purchased.Some smart startups might find a competitive advantage by offering customer-centric products with an option of “no changes” and “perpetual feature rights” guarantee.

A 21st Century Bill of Consumer Product Rights For books/texts/video/music: No changes to content paid for (whether on a user’s device or accessed in the cloud) For software/hardware: Notify users if an update downgrades or removes a feature Give users the option of not installing an update Provide users an ability to rollback (go back to a previous release) of the software.

Lessons Learned The product you bought today may not be the product you have later.

Manufacturers can downgrade your product as well as upgrade it.

You have no legal protection.

ALERTS

Counting DownWindows XP Support A number of zero-day exploits against Windows XP that have been already discovered but neither reported, nor used in order to be exploited after the support period has ended.

These exploits could stay effective for years, causing damage to the user or company stuck with Windows XP. If, up until now, XP customers had a bad time with malware because they were unable to apply hotfixes different reasons, the situation will become worse as, even if the customers wanted, they would not have any new hotfixes to apply after April 2014.

Feeding Frenzy Stockpiles of zero day exploits aren’t the only vulnerabilities XP users will have to worry about after XP support disappears.

Microsoft itself could provide hackers with weapons to attack the OS. That’s because each version of Windows shares code and logic from previous versions.

If you were to find a defect in Windows 8,

then that defect probably exists backwards to other Windows versions. So clever cybercriminals will be closely studying fixes for supported versions of Windows for clues to XP flaws.

People can look at those patches and think, ‘What were they patching? I bet this same problem exists in XP, but it’s not patched because they’re no longer patching it.

Security of an operating system drops off a cliff when support ends. It’s not that defects exist in the code, it’s that they’re not getting patched. As Microsoft patches recent versions of Windows, it will become a feeding frenzy as hackers use those patches to attack XP. Office for iPad Security Microsoft Office users who have longed for a version on their iPads had their wishes fulfilled last week.

Besides satisfying the desires of tablet users, the move also should be welcome by security pros. The iPad is a much safer device than laptops and desktops. Software

installed on it is controlled through the App Store, and the architecture is much newer than what you’d find on a typical Windows computer.

Folding Office into the Apple ecosystem means it gets the same benefits as other apps in the ecosystem. For example, you get a streamlined updating process. Many of the problems with software is that outdated, vulnerable versions are being used. We’d all be better off if we used the latest version of Office, which was engineered with malicious actors in mind.

Dual Identities Even with Apple’s walled garden model, though, some security concerns will continue to exist, especially since it will be easier to stuff sensitive corporate documents into an iPad and work on them there.

If you’re working on Word docs and potentially sensitive PowerPoint presentations and storing them, then

an enterprise needs to make sure those documents remain confidential and aren’t leaked.

As with native Apple apps, Microsoft is keen on linking what happens in Office for the iPad to its OneDrive cloud service. That too needs to be scrutinized in an enterprise environment.

Security of how those documents are pushed up to Micrsoft’s cloud is also critical. Identity management is necessary for both those pieces.

To protect company Office files on an iPad that’s used for both work and personal tasks, it may be necessary to give the device a dual personality.

If you want to reconcile the use of Office with Facebook, Angry Birds and personal email, then the current trend is to turn that device into something that supports two identities: the dual persona model, where the enterprise can slice off a corner of the employee’s device, impose their own policy, and be confident of the security of their own data - but not impose Draconian rules on how the employee uses the rest of the device.

Breach Diary March 24.

Reports based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden reveal that the NSA spied on servers and executives of Chinese networking company Huawei Technologies.

March 24.

Microsoft reports vulnerability in its Word program that could allow a hacker to gain control of a computer. The flaw in RTF files can be activated without opening the file if viewed in Microsoft Outlook with its preview RTF files option enabled.

March 24.

Secure Domain Foundation, a multistakeholder organization, is launched to fight domain-based security threats.

March 25.

Cross-platform password manger LastPass releases version of its software for Android and Google Chrome in Android.

March 25.

French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir sues Google, Facebook and Twitter over data collection clauses in their privacy policies. It contends those provisions violate French law.

March 25.

Data breach notification bill introduced in New Mexico House of Representatives.

Measure requires consumers be notified within 10 days of the discovery of a data breach that exposes unencrypted personal data of consumers.

March 26.

Two banks sue IBM company Trusteer claiming the company failed to adequately protect Target from hackers that breached the retailer’s systems last year and stole payment card and personal information of some 110 million customers. Trustmark National Bank and Green Bank N.A. are seeking US$5 million in damages from Trusteer and Target, also named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

March 27.

Yahoo reports government requests for information about its users declined in the second half of 2013 compared to the first half, to 21,425 from 29,740. Meanwhile, such requests jumped at Google to 27,477 from 25,879.

March 27.

Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer of the Distributed Computing Group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich release study discounting Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange operators’ claim that malleability attack was used to steal $500 million in bitcoins from the exchange.

March 27.

President Obama announces suspension of government’s bulk telephony metadata program. Data will remain with phone companies and may be only accessed by government agencies with a court order.”

Amazing Little Companies 2 Watch E

merging Companies Summit is a place to check out some of the firms that could become the next breakout company. It didn’t disappoint this year. Among the highlights: A firm that could redefine advertising connected to Web pictures and videos; a company that could put your entire desktop and gaming experience in the cloud; one that could help you actually hear that TV you see at a restaurant or bar; and one that equips a little box to do a workload that typically would require a server farm.

The Winner: Map-D

Map-D won the Grand Prize, and it didn’t even have venture money. This is a little bootstrapped company that has figured how to perform analytics in graphics chip memory with the goal of identifying malicious activity. Considering the concerns surrounding security, thanks to the NSA and the huge Target breach, this is not only an innovative approach to the problem, but also an incredibly compelling one.

AudioStream TV has developed an app that allows you to stream the audio from the TV you are watching but can’t hear at a restaurant, bar, airport, across the room from a TV showing some really interesting breaking news story, and either the sound is turned off or just can’t be heard.

X-Fire

Mainframe 2 puts your desktop in the cloud and is one of the most aggressive users of Nvidia Grid, the platform Nvidia created to host desktops.

X-Fire showcased exactly that, and it too was one of my panel’s favorites. It has thought through how to display the games and show the changes in rankings based on gamer performance, making the entire thing far more interesting.

Sqream Technologies Sqream Technologies also presented in my session and was one of my personal favorites (which likely justifies the Map-D decision above). It implements massive parallel computing power to analyze huge data sets in near real time by using hardware that costs a tiny fraction of the servers that most companies buy to do this work. Analytics will change the world, and this solution makes big analytics not only fast, but also very affordable.

In the future, we’ll watch video game tournaments like we do real live games.

We can sort of do that now, but to get to the kinds of massive audiences major sporting events capture, we’ll need a new technology and approach to the problem.

WeSee: The biggest problem that data analytics companies have been struggling with is organizing unstructured data.

Pictures and videos, in particular, are a bitch to automatically index, and you need to be able to do this to connect ads to the items folks are viewing and to sort them more effectively. WeSee can process billions of images a day to connect them to the appropriate ads, and it apparently has taken the big European markets by storm as

ALERTS

a result. It is kind of amazing what WeSee has been able to accomplish.

Kvantum is a company that should really worry Google and Facebook, not because it competes with them, but because its technology analyzes ad performance and showcases what is working and what isn’t.

Companies spend millions on advertising, and most of the money they spend is largely wasted on online properties that aren’t working. Kvantum could end that. Services like Google and Facebook have benefited because advertisers couldn’t determine where the value was. This tool could shift large amounts of revenue to where it could do more good - possibly away from Google and Facebook. This company’s offering could have a massive impact on a variety of firms that live off Internet marketing.

G-Clusteris a cloud gaming company that you’ll likely see on your set-top box or TV shortly, if you don’t see it already. It focuses first on the kinds of games you can play on TVs with remotes, and it has the breadth to host more traditional titles. If you want to play casual games on your TV, this is the company that will get you there.

Wrapping Up: Woof - ECS, once again, was amazing -- and I only attended a few of the sessions. There were several days of back-to-back presentations by early stage companies that will change the technology world, as we know it, if they’re successful.

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enterprise collaboration CASESTUDY

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n enterprise collaboration plan is a project charter that documents how an organization will use its collaboration platform during the course of projects and daily business operations. While running SharePoint on-premise can be expensive for some organizations, it’s prudent to track how you’re getting maximum business and productivity value from Software-as-aService (SaaS) collaboration platforms as well.

We have seen SharePoint work famously, and have seen it fail. We have been burned by email inboxes, and seen other in-house and SaaS solutions perform to varying degrees. Since writing for FSpro, we get even more exposure to collaboration platforms; now we are wondering why so many organizations don’t have a plan for moving to a collaboration platform.

All of this got us thinking that organizations should document a plan to help their teams move from email inboxes and shared drives to a collaboration platform. An enterprise collaboration plan should include.

Collaboration goals “Build it and they will come” isn’t a foundation for a collaboration platform. An enterprise collaboration plan should include your organization’s business goals for collaboration, including: • A system of record for all project documents; • A central communications hub for project teams and departments; and • Centralized events scheduling for the team and the project.

Project management touch points The SaaS market is at an interesting period of project management, collaboration, and enterprise social convergence; I think this helps and hinders organizations during the collaboration platform selection process. An enterprise collaboration plan should define the project management touch points with the collaboration platform. These touch points include: • Maintaining project schedules; • Sending task assignments to team members; • Updating the status on team members’ project tasks; and • Reviewing and approving documents online via the collaboration platform rather than email.

Workspace/document library priorities Collaboration platforms revolve around workspace and/or document libraries. An enterprise collaboration plan should set workspace and document library priorities whether they are set up for each project, each project team, or a hybrid approach depending on what your platform can

support.

Roles, responsibilities, and governance Roles, responsibilities, and governance can be overly complex and can contribute to the failure of SharePoint implementations.

However, even platforms such as Huddle, Teambox, and Wrike still need roles, responsibilities and governance.

Your enterprise collaboration plan should include: 1. Platform role assignments (Administrator, editor, viewer); 2. Project manager, team lead, and team member responsibilities; and 3. Platform governance, including security and administration.

Documentation audit A documentation audit should be part of any enterprise collaboration plan. This means cleaning out email inboxes and doing away with the “secret stashes” team members have on their local hard drives; those project

documents need to migrate to your collaboration platform in a methodical manner. The enterprise collaboration plan should include: A process behind the documentation audit; A list of documents deemed to be the working and final versions; and A disposition of final documents from their previous location to a document library or workspace.

Apply platform features to current business problems Whether you’re implementing Microsoft Office 365, Confluence, or Huddle, you need to apply the platform’s features to your current business problems.

Document process changes The move to a collaboration platform might require changes to certain business processes, especially email-driven processes. Let’s say your team has a process for emailing documents to one another to review for content and technical accuracy.

The enterprise collaboration plan should

include a revised process that accounts for moving the process to the collaboration platform.

Mobile/remote access planning If mobile and remote access is a collaboration requirement in your organization, it should factor into your enterprise collaboration plan. While mobile access to SaaS collaboration platforms is just getting the user an account, on-premise collaboration platforms will require more access planning. Your plan should document the process for an end user to obtain remote access to the on-premise collaboration platform.

The plan should also document which standard mobile client apps end users should use to access your collaboration platform.

Account for BYOD If your organization has a Bring

Your Own Device (BYOD) policy, you need to account for that in your enterprise collaboration plan; this includes any access and policy changes limiting or restricting BYOD access to workspaces and document libraries. The policy and restriction changes need to be communicated to BYOD users, especially those who may lose access to the platform or a particular workspace due to BYOD policies.

While this is a definite crossover into a BYOD policy, the platform administrator(s) needs to have clear guidance on how to manage access for users with BYOD devices. This takes on added importance if your organization must be in compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Conclusion An enterprise collaboration plan can help your organization migrate to a collaboration platform in a methodical manner and get up to speed with very few problems.

BFSI Trending Towards IT 14-15

TRENDS

Financial services firms, long known for their aggressive spending on technology and process redesign have been constantly focusing on a long-term vision to sustain growth and remain competitive. As a result, spending tends to focus on solutions that increase revenue rather than decreased costs.In the midst of integration and networking tools, the FS companies are increasingly looking toward web services and regulatory compliance for propelling their spending on project-based services. Institutions completing their planning and design phase for Basel III compliance are looking closely at the guidelines for benchmarking purposes. RBI has issued guidelines for Basel III, which will now be implemented to ensure compliance.

I

nformation technology heads at India’s top enterprises will trim their budgets for 2014, and will spend nearly $25 billion this year - along with large government departments - on buying new software applications, IT services and computer hardware. Banking firms are said to have a planned increase in spend on new technologies that help link enterprise applications with mobile workforces and will keep the overall IT budget same as last year, or even hike it by 1-3%. The priority for banking & financial services in 2014 is to keep maintenance cost steady and look for new investment initiatives.

The BFSI sector continuous thrust on IT has also helped it expand its customer reach, enhance efficiency, and improve overall performance. The ultimate objective of the sector to deliver anytime, anywhere services to customers is now being realized through the use of Information & Communications Technology (ICT). From traditional software and connectivity solutions to a new set of service delivery technologies such as ATMs, mobile, and Internet banking, the Indian BFSI sector is undergoing a transition toward a better and healthier financial services environment for its clients on the domestic, as well as global front.

Thus, the total IT market in the BFSI sector is expected to grow from Rs. 15,064 crore in FY 11 to Rs. 29,009 crore by FY 15, registering a CAGR of 7%.

Encompassing the overall IT adoption by the BFSI sector, the individual sub-segments have their own business imperatives and IT adoption dynamics, key for a marketer eyeing the BFSI sector.

A study by IDC India titled Future of IT in Indian BFSI Sector states, The BFSI sector, one of the largest spenders on IT, has ambitious plans for technology deployments in the next 4-5 years. With Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Basel II, and Financial Inclusion being the focus of banks, the Insurance Industry is eagerly looking at solutions like Customer Relationship Management and Business Intelligence. The Mutual Funds and the Stock Exchanges on the other hand, being the early adopters of IT in India, have also embarked on advanced applications for uptime maintenance, Regulatory Compliance, and Data Security.

From a Banking Industry perspective, Regulatory Compliance and Risk management are the major areas of focus for banks worldwide, with the Indian banking industry being no exception. Compliance to Basel II and data security norms have been the prime drivers of IT spending by the banking fraternity. Moving ahead, they are also looking at content management and intelligent interaction management. Knowing

customers well, effectively using analytics and following through with quality service delivery are the key objectives for which the Indian banks are increasingly deploying more and more IT resources and applications.

The Insurance Industry in India is forecasted to witness sweet IT spending spots in the years ahead with focus on up gradation of IT solutions and deployment of advance level applications.

Solutions like Customer

Relationship Management (CRM) are expected to drive IT spending in next 2-3 years. Companies are looking forward to explore latent needs of customers to further add to their bundled package of products. Also, to increase their presence in rural and semi-urban areas, insurers in India are working extensively on e-enabling agents.Financial services firms, long known for their aggressive spending on technology and process redesign have been constantly focusing

on a long-term vision to sustain growth and remain competitive.

As a result, their spending tends to focus on solutions that increase revenue rather than decreased costs. In the midst of integration and networking tools, the FS companies are increasingly looking toward Web services and regulatory compliance for propelling their spending on project-based services.

Institutions completing their planning and design phase for Basel II compliance are looking

closely at the guidelines for benchmarking purposes. RBI has issued guidelines for Basel III, which will now be implemented to ensure compliance. FATCA is yet another compliance issue that needs to taken into consideration with implementation timelines of January 1st 2015 is looming large. This is critical as this implementation is projected to tak about 9 months as per contenting company estimates.

Forensic Audit SECURITY

On detecting any such phenomenon, the variable under study is subjected to a detailed scrutiny. Relative Size Factor detects outliers or unusual data, which may be due to either simple errors or frauds based on the basic concept that each field in any transaction has a normal range and any data falling outside the range is unusual or an outlier and need to be further, investigated. Of course, an important caveat is that these measures are not foolproof and hence once needs to be aware of its limitations so that they are only applied to certain sets of applicable datasets.

E

ven as we like things to remain simple, the truth is that today is an age of complexity where new technology developments have spurred developments in s many walks of life and subject areas. As George Orwell once said ‘Men are only as good as technical development allows them to be.’ Concentrating on the financial system, the financial system infrastructure today in India and elsewhere is mainly dependent on the technology backbone. New types of products including derivatives and various delivery channels are simply impossible to design, build and implement without availability of electronic or computing technologies.

Product innovation and their complexities in this globalised and competitive world have created a plethora of accounting rules and other regulations impacting the way transactions are stored, recorded and valued. This milieu has also led to increased susceptibility to mask or hide fraudulent activities within the maze of links constituting a complex financial transaction.

Further, the penetration of technology into banking processes has led to a situation that clear trail of a financial transaction can be unraveled only after drilling through several layers of technology in addition to the human component. Today, the accepted truth is that conventional audit methodologies may not suffice to arrive at the truth about a complex financial transaction. Rather a mélange of processes and techniques termed as forensic audit or forensic accounting methodologies is imperative to fully decrypt and decipher the mechanics of the complex financial transaction in question and conclude about the presence of a fraud and to present the case in a manner amenable and acceptable in a court of law.

As a regulator with an inquisitive mind, what is fascinating to me is the sheer number of disciplines involved in forensic examination. A forensic specialist is supposed to have expertise or training in one or more of relevant disciplines like auditing, fraud examination, accounting, law, computer technologies apart from the investigative skills to collect, analyze, and evaluate evidential matter and to interpret and communicate the observations and findings. I think a forensic specialist is both a detective and an adventurer. It is always exciting and fruitful when one employs forensic techniques to solve seemingly intractable and complex issues. As Mark Alden had said in the context of forensic accounting – ‘There’s nothing better than that thrill of getting the final bit of evidence that pieces the jigsaw together’.

Leaving aside the individualistic perspective, we need to get the import of the criticality of forensic auditing in todays environment and why Reserve Bank of India has in recent times focused on the importance of forensic audit skills. As seasoned bankers, you would appreciate that banking is all about trust and confidence and fraud is one way of eating away at these vital pillars on which banking leans upon. It is not only a question of loss suffered by a bank but also about the issue of a culture and system in a bank which needs to have zero tolerance towards a fraudster and fraudulent activities and has strong preventive, detective and corrective capability. Reserve Bank of India has issued numerous circulars/guidelines/reports on frauds and related aspects. One of the recent circular issued on September 16, 2009 on the subject of ‘Fraud Risk Management System in banks – Role of Chairmen/Chief Executive Officers’ has required banks to take certain measures to ensure effective and quick investigation, monitoring and follow up of frauds. The need for forensic skills was stressed as part of this circular.

The banks were required to set up dedicated and well organized “Special Surveillance and Investigation Function”, which would, on continuous basis, exercise surveillance over potentially fraud prone areas and investigate into large value frauds with the help of skilled manpower for internal punitive action against the staff and external legal prosecution of the fraudsters and their abettors.

We would also like to highlight the Basel III related regulatory dispensation which requires allocation of capital for credit, market and operational risks under Pillar I & II and all the risks not considered or inadequately considered under Pillar I to be incorporated under Pillar II. Losses due to frauds would impact operational risk under Pillar I and also residual operational risk and reputational risk concerns under Pillar II. Hence, better internal control processes leading to lesser incidence of frauds could enable a bank to economize on its capital resources.

Many of you may be from the auditing field. It is important that the essential differences between the normal audit

of electronic data and observation verses surveillance.

It is also acknowledged that forensic audit or accounting skills can also reduce audit risk. Professional auditing standards in recent years have enjoined upon auditors to consider the risks of material misstatements due to a fraud. During the course of an audit, evidence or information may come to the auditor’s attention that fraud may have occurred. In these circumstances, the auditor maintains an obligation to perform sufficient audit work to obtain reasonable assurance that the financial statements are not materially misstated. In such a circumstance it may become necessary to involve a forensic specialist or perform forensic procedures in order to obtain the appropriate level of assurance with respect to the financial statements or the audited aspects. Thus, forensic auditing can also be pro-actively used as opposed to the widely acknowledged reactive usage by management or by auditors, to carry out general reviews of activities to highlight risks arising either out of fraud or in a potential fraud prone area for the purpose

and forensic accounting or fraud audit techniques are clearly understood and appreciated. The questions the fraud auditor has uppermost in mind are not how an accounting system and internal controls stack up against applicable standards but rather: ■ Where are the weakest links in this system’s chain of controls?

■ What deviations from conventional good accounting practices and/or rules or guidelines are possible in this system?

■ How are off-line transactions handled, and who can authorize such transactions?

■ What would be the simplest way to compromise this system?

■ What control features in this system can be bypassed by higher authorities?

■ What is the nature of the work environment?

Auditing for fraud pro-actively involves being aware of the various fraud schemes in the area being looked at and looking for similar patterns that may constitute a fraud.

It is stated that the timeliness of fraud detection lies in detecting the symptom or indicator of fraud, what are known as ‘red flags’ in timely manner. To pro-actively facilitate fraud risk management, it is important that banks identify the ‘red flags’ in respect of major banking functions or processes.

We understand that comparison between normal audit evidence and forensic evidence includes many aspects like documentation verses public document searches, inquiry verses interviewing, confirmation verses varied alternative sources, physical examination verses electronic laboratory analysis of evidence, reperformance verses detailed analysis

of initiating focussed reviews of particular areas and targeting specific threats to a banking organization.

It is quite interesting to know some of the basic theories involved in fraud detection of which I can recall some like the Occam’s razor, the theory of inverse logic and the doctrine of triage. While their explanations may be apparently simple in contrast to the apparently esoteric sounding names, the trick lies in comprehending and applying them suitably in practical situations. I think you will get an overview on these aspects during the programme.

I am also fascinated by some of the techniques involved in forensic accounting or auditing about which I have some broad idea. One of the technique I have often read about is Benford Analysis which is a mathematical tool to determine whether variable under study is a case of unintentional errors (mistakes) or fraud. The Benford’s law states that fabricated figures as indicators of fraud possess a different pattern from random or valid figures. On detecting any such phenomenon, the variable under study is subjected to a detailed scrutiny. Relative Size Factor detects outliers or unusual data, which may be due to either simple errors or frauds based on the basic concept that each field in any transaction has a normal range and any data falling outside the range is unusual or an outlier and need to be further, investigated. Of course, an important caveat is that these measures are not foolproof and hence once needs to be aware of its limitations so that they are only applied to certain sets of applicable datasets. I am sure you would get some idea regarding these aspects during the course of this programme.

Data mining techniques can also be used as a forensic accounting technique which involves use of computer-assisted techniques to mine large volumes of data for new, hidden or unexpected information or patterns. Data mining techniques are categorized into Discovery, Predictive modeling and Deviation and Link analysis.

We would also like to stress upon the importance of the use of the Computer Assisted Auditing Tools (CAATs) to deal with auditing in computerized environment for querying large data sets, and to process complex transactions thereby saving time, and improving effectiveness. The tools help an auditor in implementing auditing procedures such as testing details of transactions and balances, identifying inconsistencies or significant fluctuations in the datasets being tested, testing general as well as application control of computer systems, re-performance of calculations performed by application or accounting systems among other areas. There are various areas where these tools can be used like KYC/AML aspects, detecting revenue leakage, adherence to various RBI norms like IRAC norms, operations in inoperative accounts, high-value transactions, loans, forward exchange contracts, derivatives, forex/ treasury, trade finance etc.

Department of Banking Supervision had initiated a few years back a pilot process of using audit tools as part of AFIs in respect of a few banks and initiatives are underway to further enhance the use of the audit tool in certain areas of concern depending on risk assessment. It is critical that such tools are used by banks internally to improve the outcomes of internal audit and forensic examination processes.

In many areas of investigation, Computer Forensics is part of forensic audit and involving using various tools to gather or collect data, examine the data, analyzing the data and followed by reporting the finding. I understand there are various toolkits to conduct forensic analysis of any operating system, databases, mail software, cell phones, PDAs, network devices etc.

To support forensic investigation, it is important that banks incorporate the needs of forensics as part of their information system lifecycle. As many of you may know, in the recent Monetary Policy, Governor had announced creation of Working Group on Information Security, Electronic Banking, Technology risk management and tackling cyber frauds to enhance guidelines in the relative areas on par with international standards. Iam the Chairperson of the Group and it consists of experts on various areas like academics, law, information security, audit and IT. We propose to incorporate some requirements relating to forensics as part of the Group’s recommendations.

I believe that auditing for fraud is as much of an intuitive process as it is a formal, analytic methodology. It is as much of an art as it is a science. Skill depends on the right mind-set (like thinking like a fraudster, keen eye to look at weaknesses in controls) and practice. The requirement is not just to master the techniques of forensic audit but also to have the required mental disposition of doggedness and persistence.

In the backdrop of increase in frauds and the need for developing forensic audit skills, I believe that personnel having such skills would be in great demand and would be valuable assets to a bank for their fraud risk management activities. I hope some of you who are attending this programme start applying the techniques taught and also go in for more advanced training as required. Others who are in middle and senior decision making authorities can at least know the processes involved which may enable them to support putting in place aOpening suitable forensic capability in your banks. remarks of Shri G.Gopalakrishna, Exectuive Director, RBI,Central Office,Mumbai for the Pilot programme conducted

by CAB,Pune.

BYOD

Cost/benefit analysis

By W J Kollare

Perhaps the most difficult element of the whole Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement is determining the benefits your organization can derive from this. There’s no guaranteed formula for assessing the costs versus benefits of BYOD for an organization — BYOD is far from a one-sizefits-all initiative. Organizations contemplating BYOD should ideally do a thorough, upfront cost/benefit analysis.

Capital costs of company-owned devices One of the first items to grasp when performing a COD v/s BYOD cost/benefit analysis is the current cost of owning and maintaining company-owned laptops and mobile devices. This is one of the many areas of information that require input from purchase, accounting and IT management. When identifying out current costs of corporate-owned devices, do not forget elements such as maintenance plans and “consumables,” like chargers, batteries, carry bags and protective material. Also factor in the analysis for loss of goods/ insurance and complexities of data loss.

BYOD policy development and program management BYOD policy development and ongoing program management are overhead tasks that can’t be billed back to a client. Such projects can even be harder to justify these days due to our down economy. BYOD policy development and management require the attention of a project manager and even higher-level stakeholders (at least in the beginning), who may spend better time on customer-facing projects and running the business. You need to decide whether BYOD can get the appropriate attention or whether your staff needs to focus on revenue-generating projects.

Hidden back-end costs Opening up the corporate network to BYOD devices can also lead to some hidden back-end costs, most notably when it comes to enterprise software licensing and increased network traffic. While some of these costs can be discovered through upfront analysis, it still may lead your company down the path to increased costs if you have to add system capacity, security, and administration to accommodate an influx of BYOD users.

Benefits to employee morale and productivity Keeping ragged PC’s and poorly implemented backend systems working was often a blow to the morale and productivity. As part of your cost/benefit analysis, it can be helpful to take a look at the potential impact BYOD can have on employee morale and productivity. It might be hard to quantify it as a budget item — so then look at the impact BYOD might have on the work of your more tech-savvy employees.

Internal app development costs Many organizations run their business on some key — yet legacy — applications.

Opening these applications up to BYOD users might mean further app development and maintenance that may not have been in the original application requirements.

Risk management Every day we expect to go online and read about the first high-profile security breach that critics trace back to BYOD. While the breaches are out there, some may impact you so big it, that will make mainstream news headlines and lead to consequences across organizations large and small that are going BYOD. Updating in-place enterprise security and help desk The move to BYOD means extra responsibilities and costs for your enterprise security and help desk staff as part of the build-out and management of technology infrastructure, the ongoing added support, and the costs of increased support for

BYOD users. Your organization can rack up additional costs, such as: • Updating help desk policies and procedures to accommodate the BYOD initiative.

• Developing new user documentation and help desk knowledge base content.

• Updating existing corporate IT security training.

• Retraining and/or cross-training of help desk staff.

Implementing and managing an MDM solution Beyond the technical considerations of implementing a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution, there are the costs to be concerned with. Even if you choose to go with a cloud solution, it still means subscription costs for MDM that need to be factored into your overall budget for BYOD. While you’re at it, factor in the

hourly rate of the IT staff that will be responsible for managing the solution.

BYOD stipends and/or allowances While mobile device ownership is just assumed these days, usage of corporateowned mobile devices by employees has traditionally been about the position and job classification. Will stipends and/or allowances that come with opening up BYOD to employees at all levels result in savings or more expense for the company?

Companies have the benefit of corporate discounts when they purchase voice and data plans that a person doesn’t have, so the costs of corporate versus personal purchasing of voice and data plans could become a strike against going BYOD. A meeting with a corporate sales person from your current mobile provider should be an action item on your road to BYOD.

Responsive to customers This item is an intangible and requires a corporate values or gut check. Opening up corporate access to personal mobile devices should help employees be more responsive to customers. It does not have to be the work/life balance rabbit hole you often see organizations go down.

The value of cost/benefit analysis BYOD cost/benefit analysis is a time to step away from the analysts, pundits, and the buzz around BYOD that sometimes overwhelms the more practical aspects of the initiative. It will also help you take a good, hard look at workplace and financial realities that might make or break your BYOD plans.

The Cloud & Other Media CLOUD

Two-and-a-half years ago, we described eight technologyenabled business trends that were profoundly reshaping strategy across a wide swath of industries. We showed how the combined effects of emerging Internet technologies, increased computing power, and fast, pervasive digital communications were spawning new ways to manage talent and assets as well as new thinking about organizational structures.

Since then, the technology landscape has continued to evolve rapidly. Facebook, in just over two short years, has quintupled in size to a network that touches more than 500 million users. More than 4 billion people around the world now use cell phones, and for 450 million of those people the Web is a fully mobile experience. The ways information technologies are deployed are changing too, as new developments such as virtualization and cloud computing reallocate technology costs and usage patterns while creating new ways for individuals to consume goods and services and for entrepreneurs and enterprises to dream up viable business models. The dizzying pace of change has affected our original eight trends, which have continued to spread (though often at a more rapid pace than we anticipated), morph in unexpected ways, and grow in number to an even ten.

The rapidly shifting technology environment raises serious questions for executives about how to help their companies capitalize on the transformation under way. Exploiting these trends typically doesn’t fall to any one executive—and as change accelerates, the odds of missing a beat rise significantly. For senior executives, therefore, merely understanding the ten trends outlined here isn’t enough. They also need to think strategically about how to adapt management and organizational structures to meet these new demands.

For the first six trends, which can be applied across an enterprise, it will be important to assign the responsibility for identifying the specific implications of each issue to functional groups and business units. The impact of these six trends—distributed co-creation, networks as organizations, deeper collaboration, the Internet of Things, experimentation with big data, and wiring for a sustainable world—often will vary considerably in different parts of the organization and should be managed accordingly. But local accountability won’t be sufficient.

Because some of the most powerful applications of these trends will cut across traditional organizational boundaries, senior leaders should catalyze regular collisions among teams in different corners of the company that are wrestling with similar issues.

Three of the trends—anything-as-a-service, multisided business models, and innovation from the bottom of the pyramid—augur far-reaching changes in the business environment that could require radical shifts in strategy.

CEOs and their immediate senior teams need to grapple with these issues; otherwise it will be too difficult to generate the interdisciplinary, enterprise-wide insights needed to exploit these trends fully. Once opportunities start emerging, senior executives also need to turn their organizations into laboratories capable of quickly testing and learning on a small scale and then expand successes quickly. And finally the tenth trend, using technology to improve communities and generate societal benefits by linking citizens, requires action by not just senior business executives but also leaders in government, nongovernmental organizations, and citizens.

Across the board, the stakes are high. Consider the results of a recent McKinsey Quarterly survey of global executives on the impact of participatory Web 2.0 technologies (such as social networks, wikis, and micro blogs) on management and performance. The survey found that deploying these technologies to create networked organizations that foster innovative collaboration among employees, customers, and business partners is highly correlated with market share gains. That’s just one example of how these trends transcend technology and provide a map of the terrain for creating value and competing effectively in these challenging and uncertain times.

1. Distributed co-creation moves into the mainstream In the past few years, the ability to organize communities of Web participants to develop, market, and support products and services has moved from the margins of business

practice to the mainstream. Wikipedia and a handful of open-source software developers were the pioneers.

But in signs of the steady march forward, 70 % of the executives we recently surveyed3 said that their companies regularly created value through Web communities.

Similarly, more than 68 million bloggers post reviews and recommendations about products and services.

Intuit is among the companies that use the Web to extend their reach and lower the cost of serving customers. For example, it hosts customer support communities for its financial and tax return products, where more experienced customers give advice and support to those who need

Rapidly shifting technology environment raises serious questions for executives about how to help their companies capitalize on the transformation under way. Exploiting these trends typically doesn’t fall to any one executive—and as change accelerates, the odds of missing a beat rise significantly.

A leading social network recently recruited 300,000 users to translate its site into 70 languages—the translation for its French-language site took just one day

help. The most significant contributors become visible to the community by showing the number of questions they have answered and the number of “thanks” they have received from other users. By our estimates, when customer communities handle an issue, the per-contact cost can be as low as 10 % of the cost to resolve the issue through traditional call centers.

Other companies are extending their reach by using the Web for word-of-mouth marketing. P&G’s Vocalpoint network of influential mothers is a leading example.

Mothers share their experiences using P&G’s new products with members of their social circle, typically 20 to 25 moms. In markets where Vocalpoint influencers are active, product revenues have reached twice those without a Vocalpoint network.

Facebook has marshaled its community for product development. The leading social network recently recruited 300,000 users to translate its site into 70 languages—the translation for its French-language site took just one day.

The community continues to translate updates and new modules.

Yet for every success in tapping communities to create value, there are still many failures. Some companies neglect the up-front research needed to identify potential participants who have the right skill sets and will be motivated to participate over the longer term. Since co-creation is a two-way process, companies must also

provide feedback to stimulate continuing participation and commitment. Getting incentives right is important as well: co-creators often value reputation more than money.

Finally, an organization must gain a high level of trust within a Web community to earn the engagement of top participants.

2. Making the network the organization In earlier research, we noted that the Web was starting to force open the boundaries of organizations, allowing nonemployees to offer their expertise in novel ways. We called this phenomenon “tapping into a world of talent.”

Now many companies are pushing substantially beyond that starting point, building and managing flexible networks that extend across internal and often even external borders.

The recession underscored the value of such flexibility in managing volatility. We believe that the more porous, networked organizations of the future will need to organize work around critical tasks rather than molding it to constraints imposed by corporate structures.

At one global energy services company, geographic and business unit boundaries prevented managers from accessing the best talent across the organization to solve clients’ technical problems. Help desks supported engineers, for example, but rarely provided creative solutions for the most difficult issues. Using socialnetwork analysis, the company mapped information flows and knowledge resources among its worldwide staff. The analysis identified several bottlenecks but also pointed to a set of solutions.

Using Web technologies to expand access to experts around the world, the company set up new innovation communities across siloed business units. These networks have helped speed up service delivery while improving quality by 48 %, according to company surveys.

Dow Chemical set up its own social network to help managers identify the talent they need to execute projects across different business units and functions. To broaden the pool of talent, Dow has even extended the network to include former employees, such as retirees. Other companies are using networks to tap external talent pools. These networks include online labor markets (such as Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk) and contest services (such as Innocentive and Zooppa) that help solve business problems.

Management orthodoxies still prevent most companies from leveraging talent beyond full-time employees who are tied to existing organizational structures. But adhering to these orthodoxies limits a company’s ability to tackle increasingly complex challenges. Pilot programs that connect individuals across organizational boundaries are a good way to experiment with new models, but incentive structures must be overhauled and role models established to make these programs succeed. In the longer term, networked organizations will focus on the orchestration of tasks rather than the “ownership” of workers.

3. Collaboration at scale Across many economies, the number of people who undertake knowledge work has grown much more quickly than the number of production or transactions workers.

Knowledge workers typically are paid more than others, so increasing their productivity is critical. As a result, there is broad interest in collaboration technologies that promise to improve these workers’ efficiency and effectiveness.

While the body of knowledge around the best use of such technologies is still developing, a number of companies have conducted experiments, as we see in the rapid growth rates of video and Web conferencing, expected to top 20 % annually during the next few years.

At one high-tech enterprise, the sales force became a crucible for testing collaboration tools. The company’s sales model relied on extensive travel, which had led to high costs, burned-out employees, and difficulty in scaling operations. The leadership therefore decided to deploy collaboration tools (including video conferencing and shared electronic workspaces, which allow people in different locations to work with the same document simultaneously), and it reinforced the changes with a sharp reduction in travel budgets. The savings on travel were four times the company’s technology investment. Customer contacts per salesperson rose by 45 %, while 80 % of the sales staff reported higher productivity and a better

STOPING Cyberheists

CYBERRISK

via Customer PCs

Providing online bank customers with security software is an imperfect cybercrime antidote

I

n online banking and payments, customers’ PCs have become the Achilles’ heel of the financial industry as cyber-crooks remotely take control of the computers to make unauthorized funds transfers, often to faraway places.

That’s what happened to the town of Poughkeepsie in New York earlier this year to the tune of $378,000 carried out in four unauthorized funds transfers from the town’s account at TD Bank.

First discovered in January, the town was able to finally get the full lost amount restored

by March, according to public records, through sometimes tense interaction with the bank.

Though the town declines to discuss the matter, this highdollar cyberheist, along with a slew of other incidents in the past year, has many bank officials worried. They’re concerned that the customer desktop, especially in business banking where dollar

Banks are faced with the prospect that customers own PCs that have been in the hands of crime syndicates. Many banks finds itself getting more involved in helping customers defend their machines. One recent step has been making available for free specialized protective software for use by the bank’s 100,000 e-banking customers. amounts are high, is increasingly the weak link in the chain of trust.

Schools and churches aren’t immune, either. One cyber crime department, late last year, reported gets several new victim complaints each week.

And businesses should be even more worried than consumers about whether banks will restore monies stolen by cybercrooks exploiting compromised computers using botnet-controlled malware..

Disputes over hijacked computers and fraudulent transfers are erupting into the public eye as businesses quarrel with their banks over who is at fault when a cyber-gang manages to make off

with the money. The restoration of lost funds occurs on a case-bycase basis.

The dilemma for banks boils down to this: How far can they go

Banks are faced with the prospect that customers own PCs that have been in the hands of crime syndicates.

Many banks finds itself getting

protective software for use by the bank’s 100,000 e-banking customers.

If a problem is detected, the bank will call them and tell

How far can they go to help protect customer desktops that function like part of their shared network but aren’t owned by the bank? to help protect customer desktops that function like part of their shared network but aren’t owned by the bank?

more involved in helping customers defend their machines.

One recent step has been making available for free specialized

them. Cyber crooks would rather target high-dollar automated clearinghouse (ACH) transfers and other substantial payment

transfers from business customers, but they wouldn’t turn down what they might be able to get from consumers doing online e-banking.

No bank is immune from being faced with these ACH issues regarding a computer malware attack.

So how are you and your organization handling your customers on their security concerns. What is the % of customers using mobile for banking... and how do you secure them!!!

The Cloud...contd from pg

lifestyle.

In another instance, the US intelligence community made wikis, documents, and blogs available to analysts across agencies (with appropriate security controls, of course). The result was a greater exchange of information within and among agencies and faster access to expertise in the intelligence community. Engineering company Bechtel established a centralized, open-collaboration database of design and engineering information to support global projects. Engineers starting new ones found that the database, which contained up to 25 % of the material they needed, lowered launch costs and sped up times to completion.

Despite such successes, many companies err in the belief that technology by itself will foster increased collaboration. For technology to be effective, organizations first need a better understanding of how knowledge work actually takes place. A good starting point is to map the informal pathways through which information travels, how employees interact, and where wasteful bottlenecks lie.

States are testing these waters with offers to install sensors in customers’ vehicles.

The result is new pricing models that base charges for risk on driving behavior rather than on a driver’s demographic characteristics. Luxury-auto manufacturers are equipping vehicles with networked sensors that can automatically take evasive action when accidents are about to happen.

In medicine, sensors embedded in or worn by patients continuously report changes in health conditions to physicians, who can adjust treatments when necessary. Sensors in manufacturing lines for products as diverse as computer chips and pulp and paper take detailed readings on process conditions and automatically make adjustments to reduce waste, downtime, and costly human interventions.

As standards for safety and interoperability begin to emerge, some core technologies for the Internet of Things are becoming more widely available. The range of possible applications and their business impact have yet to be fully explored, however. Applications that improve process and energy efficiency (see trend number six, “Wiring for a sustainable world,” later in this article) may be good starting points

com, eBay, and Google, have been early leaders, testing factors that drive performance—from where to place buttons on a Web page to the sequence of content displayed—to determine what will increase sales and user engagement. Financial institutions are active experimenters as well. Capital One, which was early to the game, continues to refine its methods for segmenting credit card customers and for tailoring products to individual risk profiles. According to Nigel Morris, one of Capital One’s cofounders, the company’s multifunctional teams of financial analysts, IT specialists, and marketers conduct more than 65,000 tests each year, experimenting with combinations of market segments and new products.

Companies selling physical products are also using big data for rigorous experimentation. The ability to marshal customer data has kept Tesco, for example, in the ranks of leading UK grocers.

This brick-and-mortar retailer gathers transaction data on its ten million customers through a loyalty card program. It then uses the information to analyze new business opportunities—for example, how to create the most effective promotions

experimentation, senior leaders must buy into a “test and learn” mind-set and then serve as role models for their teams.

6. Wiring for a sustainable world Even as regulatory frameworks continue to evolve, environmental stewardship and sustainability clearly are C-level agenda topics. What’s more, sustainability is fast becoming an important corporateperformance metric—one that stakeholders, outside influencers, and even financial markets have begun to track. Information technology plays a dual role in this debate: it is both a significant source of environmental emissions and a key enabler of many strategies to mitigate environmental damage. At present, information technology’s share of the world’s environmental footprint is growing because of the ever-increasing demand for IT capacity and services. Electricity produced to power the world’s data centers generates greenhouse gases on the scale of countries such as Argentina or the Netherlands, and these emissions could increase fourfold by 2020. McKinsey research has shown, however, that the use of IT in areas such as smart power grids, efficient buildings, and better logistics

In the longer term, collaboration will be a vital component of what has been termed “organizational capital.”4 The next leap forward in the productivity of knowledge workers will come from interactive technologies combined with complementary investments in process innovations and training. Strategic choices, such as whether to extend collaboration networks to customers and suppliers, will be important.

4. The growing ‘Internet of Things’ The adoption of RFID (radio-frequency identification) and related technologies was the basis of a trend we first recognized as “expanding the frontiers of automation.”

But these methods are rudimentary compared with what emerges when assets themselves become elements of an information system, with the ability to capture, compute, communicate, and collaborate around information—something that has come to be known as the “Internet of Things.” Embedded with sensors, actuators, and communications capabilities, such objects will soon be able to absorb and transmit information on a massive scale and, in some cases, to adapt and react to changes in the environment automatically.

These “smart” assets can make processes more efficient, give products new capabilities, and spark novel business models.

Auto insurers in Europe and the United

for trials, since the number of successful installations in these areas is growing.

For more complex applications, however, laboratory experiments, small-scale pilots, and partnerships with early technology adopters may be more fruitful, less risky approaches.

5. Experimentation and big data Could the enterprise become a full-time laboratory? What if you could analyze every transaction, capture insights from every customer interaction, and didn’t have to wait for months to get data from the field? What if . . . ? Data are flooding in at rates never seen before—doubling every 18 months—as a result of greater access to customer data from public, proprietary, and purchased sources, as well as new information gathered from Web communities and newly deployed smart assets. These trends are broadly known as “big data.” Technology for capturing and analyzing information is widely available at ever-lower price points. But many companies are taking data use to new levels, using IT to support rigorous, constant business experimentation that guides decisions and to test new products, business models, and innovations in customer experience. In some cases, the new approaches help companies make decisions in real time. This trend has the potential to drive a radical transformation in research, innovation, and marketing.

Web-based companies, such as Amazon.

for specific customer segments—and to inform decisions on pricing, promotions, and shelf allocation. The online grocer Fresh Direct shrinks reaction times even further: it adjusts prices and promotions daily or even more frequently, based on data feeds from online transactions, visits by consumers to its Web site, and customer service interactions. Other companies too are mining data from social networks in real time. Ford Motor, PepsiCo, and Southwest Airlines, for instance, analyze consumer postings about them on socialmedia sites such as Facebook and Twitter to gauge the immediate impact of their marketing campaigns and to understand how consumer sentiment about their brands is changing.

Using experimentation and big data as essential components of management decision making requires new capabilities, as well as organizational and cultural change. Most companies are far from accessing all the available data. Some haven’t even mastered the technologies needed to capture and analyze the valuable information they can access. More commonly, they don’t have the right talent and processes to design experiments and extract business value from big data, which require changes in the way many executives now make decisions: trusting instincts and experience over experimentation and rigorous analysis. To get managers at all echelons to accept the value of

planning could eliminate five times the carbon emissions that the IT industry produces.

Companies are now taking the first steps to reduce the environmental impact of their IT. For instance, businesses are adopting “green data center” technologies to reduce sharply the energy demand of the evermultiplying numbers of servers needed to cope with data generated by trends such as distributed co-creation and the Internet of Things (described earlier in this article).

Such technologies include virtualization software (which enables the more efficient allocation of software across servers) to decrease the number of servers needed for operations, the cooling of data centers with ambient air to cut energy consumption, and inexpensive, renewable hydroelectric power (which of course requires locating data centers in places where it is available).

Meanwhile, IT manufacturers are organizing programs to collect and recycle hazardous electronics, diverting them from the waste stream.

IT’s bigger role, however, lies in its ability to reduce environmental stress from broader corporate and economic activities.

In a significant push, for example, utilities around the world are deploying smart meters that can help customers shift electricity usage away from peak periods and thereby reduce the amount of power generated by inefficient and costly peakload facilities. Smart grids can also improve

INR 475 per sq cm

TECHTRADE

What is

b.net?

b.net is a unique property designed to showcase your efforts in promoting your organizational brand and its product lines through events, conferences, seminars, product launches and other customer engagement programs. A large amount of effort is needed to achieve success in these initiatives that have very limited margins of error as the result is apparent almost immediately.

Brand communications have as yet to take its significance in positioning at these fora, unlike what is practiced in the global market. Some organizations have however initiated global standards in brand communications which is yet to be taken up by the smaller organizations.

We invite Marketing Heads to show case their initiatives in this section to share their stories with a larger universe.

Share your case studies and event pictures on these pages.

For details on how to b.net; write in to ryan@transactmedia.in or valentine@transactmedia.in

Galaxy Note fashion template

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alaxy Note has launched its new hand held. The new product range includes a customer due diligence system that accurately detects any changes in a customer’s risk profile. It also features enhanced anti-money laundering and case management capabilities.

Samsung, with the help of a visual scenario designer to recommend optimal detection models, provides instant assessment of the impact of potential scenarios and risk-rating changes.

In addition, its high-memory architecture speeds up the visual experience, while reducing buffering through improved efficiency.

FREE

IBM launches new product range at Indian Tech Expo

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BM has launched new product suite to help financial institutions in efficient detection of potential suspicious activity.

The new product range includes a customer due diligence system that accurately detects any changes in a customer’s risk profile. It also features enhanced anti-money laundering and case management capabilities.

IBM Bsiness Crimes Suite, with the help of a visual scenario designer to recommend optimal detection models, provides instant assessment of the impact of potential scenarios and risk-rating changes.

In addition, its in-memory architecture speeds up analysis of real-time testing environments, while reducing guesswork through improved model efficiency.

The EMC cloud and Big Data stall at the cloud symposium

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MC alaxy Note M has launched new product suite to help financial institutions in efficient detection of potential suspicious activity.

The new product range includes a customer due diligence system that accurately detects any changes in a customer’s risk profile. It also features enhanced anti-money laundering and case management capabilities.

EMC Cloud and Big Data Analysis Suite, with the help of a visual scenario designer to recommend optimal detection models, provides instant assessment of the impact of potential scenarios and risk-rating changes.

In addition, its in-memory architecture speeds up analysis of real-time testing environments, while reducing guesswork through improved model efficiency.

iPhone5 launch presentation and demo session

i

phone has launched new product suite to help financial institutions in efficient detection of potential suspicious activity.

The new product range includes a customer due diligence system that accurately detects any changes in a customer’s risk profile. It also features enhanced anti-money laundering and case management capabilities.

Apple, with the help of a visual scenario designer to recommend optimal detection models, provides instant assessment of the impact of potential scenarios and risk-rating changes. In addition, its in-memory architecture speeds up analysis of real-time testing environments, while reducing guesswork through improved model efficiency.

The Cloud...contd from pg

the efficiency of the transmission and distribution of energy and, when coupled with energy storage facilities, could store electricity generated by renewable-energy technologies, such as solar and wind.

Likewise, smart buildings embedded with IT that monitors and optimizes energy use could be one of the most important ways of reducing energy consumption in developed economies. And powerful analytic software that improves logistics and routing for planes, trains, and trucks is already reducing the transportation industry’s environmental footprint.

Within the enterprise, both leaders and key functional players must understand sustainability’s growing importance to broader goals. Management systems that build the constant improvement of resource use into an organization’s processes and strategies will raise its standing with external stakeholders while also helping the bottom line.

7. Imagining anything as a service Technology now enables companies to monitor, measure, customize, and bill for asset use at a much more fine-grained level than ever before. Asset owners can therefore create services around what have traditionally been sold as products.

Business-to-business (B2B) customers like these service offerings because they allow companies to purchase units of a service and to account for them as a variable cost rather than undertake large capital investments. Consumers also like this “paying only for what you use” model, which helps them avoid large expenditures, as well as the hassles of buying and maintaining a product.

In the IT industry, the growth of “cloud computing” (accessing computer resources provided through networks rather than running software or storing data on a local computer) exemplifies this shift. Consumer acceptance of Web-based cloud services for everything from e-mail to video is of course becoming universal, and companies are following suit. Software as a service (SaaS), which enables organizations to access services such as customer relationship management, is growing at a 17 % annual rate. The biotechnology company Genentech, for example, uses Google Apps for e-mail and to create documents and spreadsheets, bypassing capital investments in servers and software licenses. This development has created a wave of computing capabilities delivered as a service, including infrastructure, platform, applications, and content. And vendors are competing, with innovation and new business models, to match the needs of different customers.

Beyond the IT industry, many urban consumers are drawn to the idea of buying transportation services by the hour rather than purchasing autos. City CarShare and ZipCar were first movers in this market, but established car rental companies, spurred by annual growth rates of 25 %, are also entering it. Similarly, jet engine manufacturers have made physical assets a platform for delivering units of thrust billed as a service.

A number of companies are employing technology to market salable services from business capabilities they first developed for their own purposes. That’s a trend we previously described as “unbundled production.” More deals are unfolding as companies move to disaggregate and make money from corporate value chains.

British Airways and GE, for instance, have spun off their successful business-processoutsourcing businesses, based in India, as separate corporations.

Business leaders should be alert to opportunities for transforming product offerings into services, because their competitors will undoubtedly be exploring these avenues. In this disruptive view of assets, physical and intellectual capital combine to create platforms for a new array of service offerings. But innovating in services, where the end user is an integral part of the system, requires a mind-set fundamentally different from the one involved in designing products.

8. Age of the multisided business model Multisided business models create value through interactions among multiple players rather than traditional one-on-one transactions or information exchanges.

In the media industry, advertising is a

classic example of how these models work. Newspapers, magazines, and television stations offer content to their audiences while generating a significant portion of their revenues from third parties: advertisers. Other revenue, often through subscriptions, comes directly from consumers. More recently, this advertisingsupported model has proliferated on the Internet, underwriting Web content sites, as well as services such as search and e-mail (see trend number seven, “Imagining anything as a service,” earlier in this article). It is now spreading to new markets, such as enterprise software: Spiceworks offers IT-management applications to 950,000 users at no cost, while it collects advertising from B2B companies that want access to IT professionals.

Technology is propagating new, equally powerful forms of multisided business models. In some information businesses, for example, data gathered from one set of users generate revenue when the business charges a separate set of customers for information services based on that data.

Take Sermo, an online community of physicians who join (free of charge) to pose questions to other members, participate in discussion groups, and read medical articles. Third parties such as pharmaceutical companies, health care

from multisided models. But for those that can, a good starting point for testing them is to take inventory of all the data in a company’s businesses (including data flowing from customer interactions) and then ask, “Who might find this information valuable?” Another provocative thought: “What would happen if we provided our product or service free of charge?” or—more important, perhaps—“What if a competitor did so?” The responses should provide indications of the opportunities for disruption, as well as of vulnerabilities.

9. Innovating from the bottom of the pyramid The adoption of technology is a global phenomenon, and the intensity of its usage is particularly impressive in emerging markets. Our research has shown that disruptive business models arise when technology combines with extreme market conditions, such as customer demand for very low price points, poor infrastructure, hard-to-access suppliers, and low cost curves for talent. With an economic recovery beginning to take hold in some parts of the world, high rates of growth have resumed in many developing nations, and we’re seeing companies built around the new models emerging as global players.

Many multinationals, meanwhile, are only starting to think about developing

Technology can also improve the delivery and effectiveness of many public services. Cloud computing and collaboration technologies can improve services, giving access to low-cost content, online instructors, and communities of fellow learners.

organizations, financial institutions, and government bodies pay for access to the anonymous interactions and polls of Sermo’s members.

As more people migrate to online activities, network effects can magnify the value of multisided business models.

The “freemium” model is a case in point: a group of customers gets free services supported by those who pay a premium for special use. Flickr (online storage of photos), Pandora (online music), and Skype (online communication) not only use this kind of cross-subsidization but also demonstrate the leveraging effect of networks—the greater the number of free users, the more valuable the service becomes for all customers. Pandora harnesses the massive amounts of data from its free users to refine its music recommendations. All Flickr users benefit from a larger photo-posting community, all Skype members from an expanded universe of people with whom to connect.

Other companies find that when their core business is part of a network, valuable data (sometimes called “exhaust data”) are generated as a by-product. MasterCard, for instance, has built an advisory unit based on data the company gathers from its core credit card business: it analyzes consumer purchasing patterns and sells aggregated findings to merchants and others that want a better reading on buying trends. CHEP, a logistics-services provider, captures data on a significant portion of the transportation volume of the fastest-moving consumer goods and is now building a transportationmanagement business to take advantage of this visibility.

Not all companies, of course, could benefit

markets as wellsprings of technologyenabled innovation rather than as traditional manufacturing hubs.

In parts of rural Africa, for instance, traditional retail-banking models have difficulty taking root. Consumers have low incomes and often lack the standard documentation (such as ID cards or even addresses) required to open bank accounts.

But Safaricom, a telecom provider, offers banking services to eight million Africans through its M-PESA mobile-phone service (M stands for “mobile,”pesa is Swahili for “money”). Safaricom allows a network of shops and gas stations that sell telecommunications airtime to load virtual cash onto cell phones as well.

In China, another technology-based model brings order to the vast, highly dispersed strata of smaller manufacturing facilities. Many small businesses around the world have difficulty finding Chinese manufacturers to meet specific needs.

Some of these manufacturers are located in remote areas, and their capabilities can vary widely. Alibaba, China’s leading B2B exchange, with more than 30 million members, helps members share data on their manufacturing services with potential customers and handles online payments and other transactions. Its network, in effect, offers Chinese manufacturing capacity as a service, enabling small businesses anywhere in the world to identify suppliers quickly and scale up rapidly to meet demand.

Hundreds of companies are now appearing on the global scene from emerging markets, with offerings ranging from a low-cost bespoke tutoring service to the remote monitoring of sophisticated air-conditioning

systems around the world. For most global incumbents, these represent a new type of competitor: they are not only challenging the dominant players’ growth plans in developing markets but also exporting their extreme models to developed ones.

To respond, global players must plug into the local networks of entrepreneurs, fastgrowing businesses, suppliers, investors, and influencers spawning such disruptions.

Some global companies, such as GE, are locating research centers in these cauldrons of creativity to spur their own innovations there. Others, such as Philips and SAP, are now investing in local companies to nurture new, innovative products for export that complement their core businesses.

10. Producing public good on the grid The role of governments in shaping global economic policy will expand in coming years.6Technology will be an important factor in this evolution by facilitating the creation of new types of public goods while helping to manage them more effectively.

This last trend is broad in scope and draws upon many of the other trends.

Take the challenges of rising urbanization.

About half of the world’s people now live in urban areas, and that share is projected to rise to 70 % by 2050. Creative public policies that incorporate new technologies could help ease the economic and social strains of population density. “Wired” cities might be one approach. London, Singapore, and Stockholm have used smart assets to manage traffic congestion in their urban cores, and many cities throughout the world are deploying these technologies to improve the reliability and predictability of mass-transit systems. Sensors in buses and trains provide transportation planners with real-time status to optimize routing and give riders tools to adjust commuting plans.

Similarly, networked smart water grids will be critical to address the need for clean water. Embedded sensors can not only ensure that the water flowing through systems is uncontaminated and safe to drink but also sense leaks. And effective metering and billing for water ensures that the appropriate incentives are in place for efficient usage.

Technology can also improve the delivery and effectiveness of many public services.

Law-enforcement agencies are using smart assets—video cameras and data analytics—to create maps that define high-crime zones and direct additional police resources to them. Cloud computing and collaboration technologies can improve educational services, giving young and adult students alike access to low-cost content, online instructors, and communities of fellow learners. Through the Web, governments are improving access to many other services, such as tax filing, vehicle registration, benefits administration, and employment services. Public policy also stands to become more transparent and effective thanks to a number of new open-data initiatives. At the UK Web site FixMyStreet.com, for example, citizens report, view, and discuss local problems, such as graffiti and the illegal dumping of waste, and interact with local officials who provide updates on actions to solve them.

Exploiting technology’s full potential in the public sphere means reimagining the way public goods are created, delivered, and managed. Setting out a bold vision for what a wired, smart community could accomplish is a starting point for setting strategy. Putting that vision in place requires forward-thinking yet prudent leadership that sets milestones, adopts flexible test-and-learn methods, and measures success. Inertia hobbles many public organizations, so leaders must craft incentives tailored to public projects and embrace novel, unfamiliar collaborations among governments, technology providers, other businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and citizens.

The pace of technology and business change will only accelerate, and the impact of the trends above will broaden and deepen. For some organizations, they will unlock significant competitive advantages; for others, dealing with the disruption they bring will be a major challenge. Our broad message is that organizations should incorporate an understanding of the trends into their strategic thinking to help identify new market opportunities, invent new ways of doing business, and compete with an ever-growing number of innovative rivals

NEW ON THE BLOCK INR 475 per sq cm

SAS launches new product range to combat financial crimes

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AS has launched new Financial Crimes Suite to help financial institutions in efficient detection of potential suspicious activity.

The new product range includes a customer due diligence system that accurately detects any changes in a customer’s risk profile. It also features enhanced anti-money laundering and case management capabilities.

SAS Financial Crimes Suite, with the help of a visual scenario designer to recommend optimal detection models, provides instant assessment of the impact of potential scenarios and risk-rating changes.

In addition, its in-memory architecture speeds up analysis of real-time testing environments, while reducing guesswork through improved model efficiency.

Socomec rolls out first India-made UPS

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he Chennai-based Socomec Innovative Power Solutions, 100% wholly owned subsidiary of the France-based €443 million Socomec Group, rolled out its first UPS product Delphys MP Elite from the Gurgaon plant.

The product range starts from 80 to 200 kVA with key features including neutral-free IGBT rectifier with sinusoidal absorption, transformer base UPS, several new UPS architecture, high output performances etc.

Socomec is networked by 46 business partners, 50 active value added resellers and many channel partners and associates across geographies which promote their products and services. Socomec has many technologically advanced UPS products ranging from 600 VA to 5400 kVA. Socomec UPS has been awarded with a prestigious European Frost & Sullivan award - “Product Differentiation Excellence 2013”, and has been praised for delivering “unparalleled quality, innovation and customization” through its use of cutting-edge technology to meet market needs.

SmartVista - End-to-End Payment Software

AsusTransformer Book Duet offers instant Windows to Android switching

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sus will be introducing their Transformer Book Duet laptop/tablet hybrid that offers dual-boot and instant switching between operating systems. The TD300 variant of the laptop can make a quick transition from Windows 8.1 to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. The features of the laptop include an Intel Core i7 CPU, 4GB RAM, a 128GB SSD in the tablet front and 1TB in the laptop dock and a 13-inch screen.

Asus have made tall claims in the past. But with their promise of a 4-second switch between both operating systems, there really isn’t any second guess one needs to take.

The Asus Transformer Book Duet will sell for $599 at a yet unrevealed release date.

Force launches new product range on financial risk

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AS has launched new Financial Crimes Suite to help financial institutions in efficient detection of potential suspicious activity.

The new product range includes a customer due diligence system that accurately detects any changes in a customer’s risk profile. It also features enhanced anti-money laundering and case management capabilities.

SAS Financial Crimes Suite, with the help of a visual scenario designer to recommend optimal detection models, provides instant assessment of the impact of potential scenarios and risk-rating changes.

In addition, its in-memory architecture speeds up analysis of real-time testing environments, while reducing guesswork through improved model efficiency.

A

s the payments market continues to evolve rapidly, with new technologies, payment methods, competitors and regulations, the pressures on organizations increase. Market leaders are focusing on innovation, leveraging the benefits the latest technologies bring to streamline operations, reduce costs and eliminate risks.

SmartVista was designed to ensure that our customers could take advantage of changes in the payments market faster than they competitors.

The entire solution is geared around achieving this – for example, all product attributes have been broken down so that end users can rapidly assemble their own products by simply combining the attributes they want in the way they want them. So if they have a million card holders, they can have a million different products, and most importantly they can do it in a cost effective and easy to manage way.

SmartVista’s broad range of capabilities effectively support and manage payments across all channels, including POS, branch, Internet, and mobile applications. From simple credit and debit cards to sophisticated loyalty programs and multi application smart cards, SmartVista supports all aspects of card management. In addition, SmartVista has been certified by the world’s leading payment brands, including American Express, Diners Club, MasterCard, and Visa including certification for EMV issuing and acquiring. SmartVista also detects and prevents fraud to improve your bottom line. Whether you are a card issuer, an acquirer or a bank requiring broad-based e-payment functionality, SmartVista delivers a full suite of software to transform the way your organization manages electronic payments.

Ebooks rolls out first Indiamade knowledge portal

T

he Chennai-based Socomec Innovative Power Solutions, 100% wholly owned subsidiary of the France-based €443 million Socomec Group, rolled out its first UPS product Delphys MP Elite from the Gurgaon plant.

The product range starts from 80 to 200 kVA with key features including neutral-free IGBT rectifier with sinusoidal absorption, transformer base UPS, several new UPS architecture, high output performances etc.

Socomec is networked by 46 business partners, 50 active value added resellers and many channel partners and associates across geographies which promote their products and services. Socomec has many technologically advanced UPS products ranging from 600 VA to 5400 kVA. Socomec UPS has been awarded with a prestigious European Frost & Sullivan award - “Product Differentiation Excellence 2013”, and has been praised for delivering “unparalleled quality, innovation and customization” through its use of cutting-edge technology to meet market needs.

INR 475 per sq cm

INR 475 per sq cm