Go with the flow

Intellect’s recent blog highlights one of the key issues facing finance and, by extension, the economy in the UK and beyond (IT’s role in avoiding another banking crisis).

I agree that “by facilitating more accurate flows of data within and between banks, technology can diminish the threat of bank failure and systemic risk”.

Understanding flow is the key to creating the business clarity that finance needs.

Banks’ product is money. Today, most money exists in the form of data. Banks pump this data around the globe, through people, systems and hardware, trying to make a profit. But they are starting to realise that they need more clarity about how this data flows through the complex matrix of the financial system.

As a critical strategic industry, for finance to work safely it would surely be wise to follow the lead of established process industries such as Oil & Gas. In other words, to understand how data flows through the business.

In business generally there are no standards for flows of data, and that is one of the main explanations for the problems in finance. It also explains why so many public/private IT projects fail.

In the past, architects, engineers and scientists have spent decades creating standards and practices so that flows of water, steam, electricity, oil, petrol and components could be used safely. How a business worked was clearly understood. But today banks, and companies in most other sectors, cannot see clearly the interdependencies between the individual business assets that enable the flow of data.

To answer your call to action, my colleagues and I have worked for almost 10 years on the solution to the problem of understanding data flows. It is called The OBASHI Methodology and it was recently published by The Stationery Office. OBASHI creates clarity about how a business works in any sector. It will help stakeholders understand how IT acts as the cornerstone for the 21st century banking system.

Paul Wallis