Collaboration is key - but does your data manager know?

Last Friday's afternoon chat with Enrico Camerinelli, senior analyst at Celent - Processes, People and Technology in Global Transaction Banking - talked about strategies for the development of global transaction banking departments in the midst of the credit crunch. 

The panel, which included representatives from HSBC, Swift, IT/2 and the Cranfield School of Management, talked a lot about collaboration - between banks and between banks and corporates - as well as the use of raw client data for business intelligence.

While the room opined about the need for 'open platforms' and 'speaking the langauge of the supply-side' - all I was hearing was redundant data stores, missing fields, non-existant APIs and 'why hasn't anyone mentioned standards?'.

I've heard a lot of talk over the years about how IT should be an enabler of the business, how IT needs to speak to the requirements of business units and how tech doesn't serve a purpose without a business reason. However, last Friday, I wondered if business leaders consider the impact wished-for strategies have on IT and how far legacy platforms can deliver that wish list.

Paul Higdon, CTO of IT/2 said banks 'need to have a more consistent view of data throughout the enterprise.' Yes, they do. But I would be a bit bolder than Higdon and say banks must have a central and consistent view of data throughout the enterprise. This is before all that data arrives from disparate corporate clients.

How exactly do you get that data clean? What are the specific data modeling tools you will need to extract the golden business intelligence? These are not small questions.

In terms of centralising collaboration, David Hennah from Swift said that the organisation was 'thinking' about broadening out their Trade Services Utility to include corporates.

Camerinelli opened the talk by saying that banks need to move beyond interacting with corporates only via the traditional relationship manager/corporate treasury model -to include risk managers, for example.

I would broaden that list to include data managers and IT staff. Open communication and collaboration within the enterprise, before a new corporate clients is added and new open collaboration is embarked on, could save you from a lot of #fail in the longer term.