Account opening improved?

I have had an interesting week of seeing how well, or badly banks are handling their account opening processes. I'm disappointed to see that despite obvious investments in technology, they still need some help to get their processes cleaned up so that they don't cause a new customer to jump through hoops to get things corrected right at the start of the relationship.

1) Bank of America - opening a personal checking account
I generally like BoA for their efficient and friendly customer service when you call them, and the decent online banking facility. It seems that their account opening still needs some help, or someone just didn't think things through.

In this example, my wife finally decided it was time to quit Citizens Bank, after they forced her to go to a branch to do something that should have been simple to do over the phone. So we quickly opened a BoA account online. Quick, easy, and a couple of days to wait for the welcome letter. All seemed to be going so well.

A debit card arrived two days later - with the wrong name on the card. It seems that previously having a credit card administered by BoA, then a new name from getting married was too much for BoA to handle. The credit card was reissued with her new name, but all other records still appeared in her old name. The account opening process thought it was being clever when it automatically linked the new checking account with the previous credit card account, and decided for itself that the name incorrectly floating around on the old account must have been correct after all, reverting all correspondence, cards, checks and so on to the previous name, while ignoring the account application form.

The account is effectively unusable until everything gets corrected. Not a good start to a relationship.

2) Bank of America - opening a business account for Consected
As I said, I liked BoA. Their online account opening is great (for both personal or business accounts), so I thought, unless you are not a citizen of the US. It does not matter if you have a relationship with the bank already, you must go to the branch to open a new account. Even something as simple as depositing money from a current checking account into a savings account or certificate of deposit (CD). This makes my life tricky, so I rarely put savings into BoA accounts.

Anyway, I went to the branch to open my new business account. Visiting a bank branch is slow and painful, but things went well. I was shocked at the complexity of the system the agent had to use to set up the account and the step that requires a telephone call to Chex Systems to validate my details. I have no problem with the need to do third party validation, but really can't it be more automated than recited my details over the phone to another agent?

The issue for me is that the systems that agents must use to set up accounts appear not to be at all customized to the type of account or the needs of the branch agent. It appears to be true that agents and brokers in financial institutions are limited in the types of accounts they can open less by the skills they have selling an appropriate product to a customer or being licensed to sell what is available, but in fact in the amount of training they have in the account opening systems. In all, it took me an hour to open the account. The agent was friendly and helpful, but how few customers can she help in a day if the systems force her to work at that rate?

3) Opening a Certificate of Deposit (CD) for savings with ING Direct
BoA could learn from the simplicity of opening a new account when you already have a customer relationship to work with. ING makes it easy to select a product, open the account and deposit money in it (even if I do not like their deceptive practice of indicating your available balance being your account total plus overdraft agreement where other banks just show the funds available to withdraw - I don't want to use my overdraft routinely, so don't show it to me unless I use it by accident).

ING has it right. They tailor the account opening process to the operator (me, an online customer), making it simple and easy to use, with virtually nothing to get wrong along the way. I bet that the number of 'not in good order' (NIGO) applications is near zero, though the customer base is limited to customers with an existing banking relationship with a well known institution.


This blog started out by discussing some of the issues around new account opening for financial services institutions. Three years in, despite a change of name and a broader focus, the issues around new account opening still exist. The banks need to shape up badly.

A post from the Improving It blog

To implement workflow and process automation in your business today, visit www.consected.com

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PDF forms induce stress and panic

Its approaching tax season again - in the US I'm thinking about the end of the tax year and in the UK I'm finally going to do the online tax return I've been putting off since April. And with tax returns comes the all too familiar series of questions and forms that we always hope lead us to a complete, accurate and not too large tax bill. This style of question and answer form filling is pervasive for many large personal data capture requirements, where a simple underlying workflow helps you respond with only the relevant information, based on the previous questions you have answered. We see this style of form for taxes all the time, sometimes in financial services for opening a new account, but rarely in other places. In many other applications, we still get the pixel perfect rendition of the original paper form as an electronic document, typically a PDF, with fillable fields. To me, this is a cop-out.

If you have ever filled in a PDF form online, you will start to recognize what a terrible UI a typical paper form really is (in its paper or electronic format). The spaces to enter data often fail to follow a real flow or are too small to be useful, being crammed in to fit the constraints of being printed on a fixed sized page; the notes to assist in filling complex forms are in separate documents or on pages you have to manually scroll up or down to as you enter each response; typically the form can not be submitted electronically even if it can be saved locally. I dislike PDF forms for these reasons, and the fact that they are based on paper forms that were probably designed by 'forms professionals', who probably had little understanding that mere mortals would find them so difficult to understand or use. Even something as deceptively simple as the old US 'visa waiver' for tourists visiting the country required additional 'checkers' walking along the passport control line to validate what tourists had written before they reached the immigration officer, because the form was just so difficult to use. Most people I spoke to found that they could only fill out the form correctly one time in three, and this caused significant anxiety.

In the online world, my preference is always to present an electronic form that is designed for use online. A simple layout of a vertical series of fields enabling the user to always know that the next piece of information to enter is below the previous one, not wedged in a corner filling 'ugly' whitespace. This style is easier to use and easier (and cheaper) to create, so both users and organizations win. If you need a paper form for people unable to submit online (and regulations insist on this for many industries and government), use your current paper form. Don't spend a whole load of money trying to make that paper form electronic.

Of course, many companies and government organizations would not dream of presenting a form that did not look like its original paper version. Maybe this is due to the familiarity that they believe people have with paper forms that leads to less shock when presented with them. Or in a rare case, the form required certification from a regulator, therefore changing the layout is an even more costly proposition. In this case, organizations have to accept that the design of the forms for electronic use will be complex and costly. To do so, ensure that you use a dedicated form design tool that allows you to create the forms and manage their updates into the future.

Unless it has to be done, its always recommended to design and present forms for the medium they will be used in. Paper and electronic media rarely align as we all know from trying to read multi-column PDFs online, so when it comes to requiring data entry, spare your customers the pain of scrolling more than they are typing.

It is hard to attract clients in the first place, whatever service you provide, so its essential to avoid the situation where a prospective customer chooses not to sign up with your organization or for your service due to the anxiety that a complex form gives them. Don't believe me, watch your parents when they see a complex PDF form pop up when they click a link. The expression will be of stress and panic. Do you really want to put your new customers through that?

A post from the Improving It blog

To implement workflow and process automation in your business today, visit www.consected.com

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Comcast's split personality, and what it means for businesses

Why on earth am I blogging about Comcast's joint venture with GE on NBC Universal? Since when have I been interested in such things? Well, when it touches a company that has been trying to appeal to small businesses so intensely, it seems only right that I talk 'entertainment news'.

Comcast, the largest cable company in the US, has two segments, one for the provision of the wired services, such as TV, broadband Internet and phone. The second in the programming segment, which already held some highly exciting content such as the Golf Channel and E Entertainment (depending on your TV watching preferences - I'm more of a Discovery and History watcher). My question is this: "How will the Comcast cable segment be distracted by the renewed focus on broadcast television?". Putting it another way, I see that Comcast has spent a significant amount of time recently pushing its range of non-broadcast capabilities to consumers and businesses. The provision of business Internet and VOIP solutions appears to have been a growth area, with the claim that Comcast can deliver these services better and cheaper than the 'phone' company. What happens to these now?

With the expected push from the parent company to make the NBC venture a success, will the cable segment be pushed back into focusing its growth on squeezing more out of the American consumer's pocket through broadcast TV? Will this slow its innovation of Internet, especially business focused Internet products? Or will the the new venture lead to a final opening up of the broadcast TV content onto mobile devices, on demand, with novel new subscription models? With this, will we see interesting new technology innovation with streaming video to the browser containing more than advertising and adult content? Will Internet bandwidth see a leap, with a drop in Mbits per dollar to the end customer?

As you can tell, I have none of the answers, and I would be surprised is Comcast doesn't go back to focus on what it does best - using up valuable bandwidth pushing broadcast TV across the country into people's homes. In my opinion, the revolution for TV, and the innovation of Internet services for consumers and businesses is likely to come from a different deal.

A post from the Improving It blog

To implement workflow and process automation in your business today, visit www.consected.com

Sealed with a loving kick

Software is unreliable. And it doesn't respond to the traditional approach for fixing mechanical issues - the proverbial "leather hammer". Worse still, it is easily thrown off balance by a simple change. A tweak here, an addition there, can appear to make things work in more exciting ways, though fundamentally put the whole system at risk. No warning sounds, no new clicking or grinding, just a sudden catastrophic failure.

The positive side of software is that the more that it runs, being pushed and pulled in new and unexpected ways by untrained testers (aka end-users), the more faults are found and subsequently ironed out. The problem for enterprise software vendors is that this really only happens after the software release, since beta testing is all very well, but it just delays the next round of killer functionality hitting the market and being saleable. And without that functionality being available now, how can the poor salesman be expected to hit his or her quarterly target. The reality is that software testing gets in the way of software license revenue.

This is where a software as a service (SaaS) model shows a huge benefit. Customers who are willing to take a little risk and use beta functionality can see the advantages of that functionality early, with a quick and easy rollback to the standard stuff if things start to get a little too hairy (no new installation required). The SaaS vendor can limit the availability of new functionality to just a subset of use cases it offers, while customers with different individual usages of the functionality test it in ways never considered by the designers.

With SaaS, the software that hits the masses is subsequently better tested than most enterprise software could ever dream of. There is no advantage to 'kicking' software to get it to work, but SaaS allows the next best thing - a constant prodding, poking and stretching by many people, ensuring the reliability of the software for everyone.

A post from the Improving It blog

To implement workflow and process automation in your business today, visit www.consected.com

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Business process improvement should not be scary and ugly

Focus - essential and difficult. With so many exciting opportunities to chase and things to do, it can be incredibly hard to focus on the ones that are necessary and may lead to greater success. I'm not suggesting that you or I are disorganized or easily distracted -- I just think that having to burn time on the essential but dull items of a running a business seem like such a waste. That's why I try to focus on using available services that can do some things cheaper and easier than I can, and automate (or at least simplify) those things that I can not (or do not want to) outsource.

In a way, that has been a goal of business process management (BPM) software for a while. The modeling of a business's processes has been made into something that can be done by the experts internally, while outsourcing the execution of it to a lump of software and hardware. The problem with this is that the business process management software that allows such a thing really does not exist. "What? There are loads of BPM software products!" I hear you cry. I absolutely agree - there are load. And they all do the same thing. They convince businesses that they can take control of improving their processes with the business experts they already have, draw a pretty picture, then you're done. You try it for real and reality kicks in. The salesman's shiny shoes are no longer gracing your office corridor, and you are stuck with a 3-6 month software project to get the first process running in a real environment. "I wasn't sold a software project" I hear you cry again. No, absolutely true. The truth of BPM software is that it just becomes a software project to get any useful level of solution in place. Its powerful stuff, but complex, ugly and all consuming of the resources you throw at it.

Have you noticed that there are many software solutions delivered directly online that don't need a software project to get them to work? That's because they have to be fully configurable as there is no option for the software developers to dig in and blow your budget. Salesforce.com used to be a great example, but they've bowed to the financial pressure of appealing to the techies, and now they're all about their force.com development platform. Taking that leap could be like jumping from one software development nightmare to another.

"So we are all stuck with email to run our processes?", you ask. No, I don't think so. I would like to show you an alternative, based on the familiar use of online email (like Gmail or Yahoo mail), but in a way that can capture data and documents, and control a workflow process in a way that email just can't do. It is something I have been working on for a while, and I'd love to show it to any supervisor, manager or executive that wants to improve the way their business runs, but does not have the time or energy to make it happen. And if you have a business case but not cash up front, that's fine too. Let's talk about a risk/reward structure (though the price-tag will not blow out your Amex card each month, so you probably won't need to).

There are some things that you are better off letting external resources help with, because they can do them better and cheaper. Designing, improving and running the solutions that manage your business processes is probably one of them.

A post from the Improving It blog

To implement workflow and process automation in your business today, visit www.consected.com

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Reforming health care, one inefficiency at a time

We all know that the health care system in the US needs reform one way or another. There are some big overhauls required, for sure, but there is a general level of complete inefficiency from an administration, billing and payments perspective that many find shocking. These inefficiencies just cut into the profits of the providers, some would say. True enough, and they are then reflected in what providers charge insurers, which eventually comes back round to hit the businesses and individuals that must pay for that insurance. Nothing comes for free, and when there are unnecessary costs reducing the quality of service and the cash directed at actual patient care, these things matter.

So, whether you care about the fixing health care, or just making a business run better, one area for providers to look at is how they manage billing and collections. Even in fairly routine hospital encounters, a patient may receive services, drugs and other medical items that may be billed through multiple departments. How well have the Account Receivable departments for each department bothered to work together? How often are bills presented to patients from each department individually, often for an invoiced amount less than the cost of actually generating and collecting the amount due. The same is true for small providers such as a clinic or doctor's office. Here the issues are often focused on handling paper, tracking bills and payments and handling patient inquiries.

If it is the IT systems that are in place that force this inefficiency, that is a tough nut to crack. If it is really due to the business processes for managing the entry of billable items, the consolidation of invoices across departments, or the workflow for collections, those are things that should be simpler to address.

The great thing about business processes, especially those that span departments or help small organizations, is that they can skirt the edge of the business systems you already have in place. A new or improved business process can help join the dots - providing a way to put a meaningful line of communication between the current silos of activity. Initially, there is no need to consider a rip-and-replace of systems, or complex integration. Doing something is typically better than doing nothing - and when doing something saves a significant amount of money in printing invoices, mailing bills, chasing payers or patients and hiring temporary workers to handle high workloads, you can start to see the opportunities for doing something bigger in the future.

US health care needs to achieve some quick wins on its path to a full reform. A lesson in reducing waste, putting in some business processes where there are none, and streamlining others, could be a quick win for many.

A post from the Improving It blog

To implement workflow and process automation in your business today, visit www.consected.com

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HITECH HIPAA - HR can't just push the burden onto IT

Every healthcare and HR professional in the US knows about HIPAA. Its that difficult piece of legislation that says you can't treat an individual's protected health information in the same lax way that organizations do every other aspect of an individual's 'private' data - you can't leak it, share it, sell it, or generally let it out of your sight. The problem is, although everyone knew about the legislation and new at a high-level what it meant, at many levels it lacked any real threat to make people pay attention.

The penalties from the legislation itself appeared to be more like "we expect you to screw up and release a bunch of personal information, so if you do we'll scold you a little, and we know you'll do it again anyway, so we won't penalize you too much", than a real deterrent. The fact that HIPAA worked at all in healthcare appeared to me to be that the bad press that would come from a failure. For example, the Seattle health system, Providence, was finally hit with a $100k fine, but this took repeated offenses and the loss of healthcare records of 386,000 people. According to Anne Zieger on FierceHealthIT:

The fine that will be paid by Providence is actually fairly unusual, as very few HIPAA fines have actually been imposed to date. However, its security issues are also unique. While many health organizations have lost a single laptop or backup tape to theft or disorganization in recent years, I haven't encountered any that have actually had to report multiple losses. That might explain why federal monitors took a particular interest in this organization's troubles.

As I looked through the backlog of news I had been avoiding reading this week, I started to see more stories about the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. At a time when the government is pushing electronic medical records (welcome to the 20th century US healthcare), someone is also thinking about how badly companies are likely to implement their systems. This story jumped out at me: HIPAA Enforcement Gets More Teeth:

Prior to the HITECH Act, the maximum penalty was $100 for each violation or $25,000 for all identical violations of the same provision. A covered healthcare provider, health plan, or clearinghouse could also avoid the imposition of a fine by demonstrating that it did not know that it violated the HIPAA rules.

The HITECH Act strengthened the enforcement program by establishing tiered ranges of increasing minimum penalty amounts, with a maximum penalty of $1.5 million for all violations of an identical provision. In addition, a covered entity can no longer prevent the imposition of a fine for an unknown violation unless it corrects the violation within 30 days of discovery.

The provisions for the hefty fines appear to only apply to health care providers, clearinghouses and health plans. Since HR does not fall into these categories, all the HR professionals are wondering why they were suffering HIPAA fatigue back in 2005 when the security regulations started to really hit them. The problem for HR is that they pass protected health information (often referred to as PHI) to the three types of "covered entity", therefore they fall under HIPAA security rules.

There is a a great article that talks about the role of HIPAA security in HR back in 2005: "HR's Role in HIPAA Security Compliance" By Philip L. Gordon of Littler Mendelson, P.C. As the article states, HR passed the data security issue to IT, "because that's what IT does, right?". The fact is that, unless HR takes care of its own controls and policies around the handling of protected health information, during every phase of a the relationship with an employee, including recruitment and employment through to beyond termination, there is little that IT can do but store already compromised information. If HR takes information into its own custody and loses it there (a desk drawer, papers on top of a broken shredder, files on a stolen laptop), IT can not take the blame.

For HR, make sure that the business processes you run that touch PHI can be enforced, the data captured can be secured from the point of receipt, and that there is full opportunity to audit everything that you do. You can absolutely do that with manual mechanisms, though email makes data security far more complex than you can imagine. To make HIPAA compliance less of a burden, suggest pushing the responsibility for business processes down to a dedicated business process / workflow automation tool. At a minimum this can show that you are following best practices should the worst happen and the HHS comes knocking at your door. And on a routine basis, the demonstration of compliance again becomes a 'systems' issue for IT or your software solutions vendor to handle.

Like many forms of compliance and governance, making use of process improvement technology designed for running your business better can automatically put you in a better position with HHS, and any other agency or regulator that pushes onerous, but necessary regulation.

A post from the Improving It blog

To implement workflow and process automation in your business today, visit www.consected.com

Coming soon... Download the podcast of this blog post

Ban Twitter, buy Chatter

Since every company wishes they could ban Facebook and Twitter in work time, why would a Salesforce.com want to release a social networking app called 'Chatter', and who in the world would want to pay for it?

There are elements of the time-wasting social networking tools that are incredibly valuable to large organizations, or even smaller organizations that are distributed or where workers are on the road a lot. Keeping people in touch with one another is just one element. The type of features that businesses could leverage, if they could get their employees to adopt them for professional use are:

• A LinkedIn style location for managing your professional profile, such as skills, education, and areas of company or product expertise - especially valuable in organizations where you don't always know who will be the expert in something specific you need for a project
  
• Twitter homepage or Facebook wall for advertising your current status, broadcasting cries for help, and keeping in touch quickly with those people in the other offices that you know well but rarely see
  
• Instant Messaging, like Google Talk, providing 'presence', so you know who's available and when, and the ability to contact them rapidly when they are there
  
• Wikis, like the famous Wikipedia, allowing rapid online documentation libraries to be built up by anyone - perfect for any employee, project or product related documentation that changes frequently
  
• Blogs, like this, providing a form of easy internal communications for employee information and updates, and the associated RSS feed reader
• Groups or communities of interest (e.g. Google Groups), that allow people with related interests to share their ideas and experience with others - especially valuable in development and innovation based organizations
• Online collaboration - like WebEx, or that highly hyped Google Wave, for seeing what is going on in somebody else's world and interact with it there and then
  

Most of these types of technology are available for use free of charge, inside or outside the firewall. In my opinion, the one thing that nobody has done well at this point is to pull them all together into a single, clean, secure, easy to use, and highly functional product that the CIO is willing to pay for.

Maybe, if Salesforce gets it right, they will be the first. What they will also need to get right is the ability to integrate this new stuff directly into the other applications that people use for business purposes, day in, day out. And embed collaboration into structured processes, and vice versa. Without that, collaborative, social networking tools remain an ad-hoc, "nice idea" for killing bored moments at work.

A post from the Improving It blog

To implement workflow and process automation in your business today, visit www.consected.com

Coming soon... Download the podcast of this blog post

The value of the Internet is approaching zero

The value of the Internet is approaching zero, because it is driven by marketing, vested interests and lack of transparency, according to Colin Henderson on The Bankwatch blog. We can expect a collapse of a magnitude similar to (although consequences smaller than) the current financial crisis. Which is my way of paraphrasing Colin's dire predictions for a Web based on Twitter retweets of retweets that manipulate rankings and pretend there is actually a dialog happening between people. (Colin writes it better than me, and has some great links as well).

For a real example, to see how easily manipulated Twitter is for example, take a look at Edelman's Tweetlevel, a service that tries to demonstrate the value of social-media, by creating metrics their PR professionals probably work to enhance for their clients. I have no idea what an Edelman sales-pitch is like, but I can imagine it is starting to revolve around selling how great their Tweetlevel numbers are for 'representative' clients. Even more amusing will be the game that other PR agencies will play with it. Imagine agency X walks in to Edelman's own clients and shows directly in Tweetlevel how much better the client could be doing if they moved to work with agency X.

Oh and for the sake of transparency, my Twitter names (yes I have a semi-professional one and a company one) rate quite awfully. No excuses, except that I find it hard to actually engage with people on a meaningful level and get my work done without a paid resource to help, which would really defeat the object of engaging with people in a sincere way.

It seems that I am happier spending half and hour a day writing some lengthy, sometimes original drivel on this blog, than half an hour total distracting myself every ten minutes to type 140 characters and point to a website that I found only for the purpose of manipulating my Twitter follower count. And if you occasionally enjoy what you read here, that makes it all worthwhile.

For another perspective, take a read of William Gibson's "Idoru", amazingly published in 1996. Gibson gives a high-energy and insightful view of how the Net becomes overwhelmed with corporate interests and legislation, and a dark-net called the Walled City springs up to allow people (by invitation only) to live and express themselves in a meaningful way, outside the grasp of corporate manipulation.

Yes - this blog is attached to a company website, but the thoughts expressed here are my own. Since the product you may buy from the website is also representative of my thinking, that seems to be the fairest marketing you can hope to get.

A post from the Improving It blog

To implement workflow and process automation in your business today, visit www.consected.com

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Reduction in travel saves us from misguided use of mobile technology

As the global recession bites deeply, the number of miles flown by the road-warrior and regular employees has dropped considerably. As far back as May last year, Michelle Conlin of BusinessWeek reported how:

[...] companies as varied as Advanced Micro Devices, Xerox, Cisco Systems, AstraZeneca, and Adecco are cutting internal business travel (grinding from corporate office to office) by as much as 50 percent.

Not only has this increased the need for the online collaborative tools such as WebEx and GoToMeeting, it has made me question whether companies need to focus on the expensive development of mobile clients for their traditional business applications. When everyone was constantly 'out of office', having a Blackberry UI, iPhone app, or at least a dumbed-down portal suitable for access from airport security queues around the country was an essential 'me-too' for business application vendors. The question now is whether there is sufficient value in providing this, for the vendors, or the companies that use their tools.

More and more, companies seem to want to keep track of employees, and the work they are doing. Less and less, they want them being only partially connected as they flit from city to city. Home-office working allows use of a decent laptop and a broadband network. Netbooks enable a reasonable sized screen for accessing regular web based applications on a fast-enough 3G network. So what is the value in business applications on tiny little mobile devices?

Mr/Mrs Road Warrior will be picking up a mass of email, and won't be trying to write his/her opportunity report for the regional sales VP on a Blackberry. So why waste the company's money implementing a complex system to allow such misguided use of technology.

A post from the Improving It blog

To implement workflow and process automation in your business today, visit www.consected.com

Coming soon... Download the podcast of this blog post