IBM Maximo IT asset management solutions in the financial services industry

Overview:

Financial services companies face an array of demanding and ongoing challenges, including global competition, mergers, acquisitions, converging service offerings, and an imperative to build and maintain customer loyalty.

At the same time, a growing array of compliance mandates, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, require financial services companies to report and manage the operational risks they face—that is, the risk of financial losses resulting from "internal processes, people and systems, or from external events," as Basel II defines it. This includes everything from errors in processing transactions to physical threats to branches, ATMs and data centers. A significant component of operational risk is IT risk: the risk of operational losses resulting from IT systems and processes, including system downtime, data loss or theft, and software bugs.

The importance of managing IT risk continues to grow as financial services organizations look to IT to help them improve service quality, enhance overall business agility and increase responsiveness to governance and compliance mandates—all while keeping a razor-sharp eye on IT costs.

Many financial services organizations are addressing these needs by consolidating systems and eliminating silos of information wherever possible. By taking a strategic approach to reducing IT complexity and improving reliability and manageability, companies can mitigate operational risk while boosting the return on IT investments. IT asset management is a cornerstone of this approach.

This paper examines the landscape of operational risk from an IT perspective, and suggests ways in which an IT asset management solution can reduce IT risk while conferring strategic benefits. It concludes with a discussion of the capabilities of IBM Maximo® Asset Management for IT from this perspective.

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