Collaboration and Communication within an organisation.

Fuled by the economic crisis blaming bakers for taking poor and uninformed decisions and current trends like social networking and web 2.0 have brought communication and collaboration within banks into focus.

Banks currently has several communication tools and repositories for storing and exchanging information (Variants of twitter , facbook, forums, Confluence, Sharepoint, etc.) However, the multitude of tools available has created barriers between the various IB business lines, preventing teams from learning and understanding what other teams are currently working on (i.e. new applications, different releases).

A question that most companies are trying to work out is if there are any central tools or ways to collaborate the existing tools in order to centralize the sharing of information and allow all business areas to leverage existing research and applications? Are there activities and/or forums that should be in place to facilitate the sharing of information?

This would ultimately reduce costs , imporved processes and increase collaboration and aid in leveraging the wisdom of the organisation to make informed decisions.

When we first step into an organisation like a bank, we expect that in a place filled with the greatest minds communication and collaboration would have been a problem that would have been addressed with proper governance and policies in plance. The best of the best tools and processes would be in place to help business lines speak with each other to come up with the latest complicated instruments and products at the cheapest price ( which ofcourse they would sell to the public at exhorbitant rates). Well, i find only the latter half to be true.

There are several reasons for this problem. Most banks have grown up from small organisations and until it was quite late nobody recognised the need for set standards and processes for communication. This resulted in creation of siloed business lines each adopting their own "preffered way " of communication. You would almost find glass walls in these organisations which prevent the smooth flow of information. These giants are now finding that they are left with a multitude of applications spread accross the different business line which more or less does one or more of the same subset of functionalities.

Why is this dangerous ? Well for starters - you would find that there are around 3-4 applications per user, None of these can be easily found, there is no common language between applications so the applications are also siloed just as the business line and the most dangerous of all - a communication barrier is formed which becomes part of the company culture.

I was not entirely suprised that these tools came about organically over the years. To understand why this is so, we should think about how banks are organised. Istrongly believe that banks have never been organised as a corporate with a single central management division deciding organisational wide strategies and policies. It has historically been aligned to the business or even trading desks. Each desk wants to make more money and hence their need drives IT to build tools which are the need of the hour. Not much thought was put in to consolidate tools until it was found to be unmanageable.