Pub. 6 2016-2017 Issue 2

O V E R A C E N T U R Y : B U I L D I N G B E T T E R B A N K S - H E L P I N G C O L O R A D A N S R E A L I Z E D R E A M S September • October 2016 17 ments for a long time. They are what administrators know and work with every day, and there is a lot of resistance when you try to change them because the process is time consuming and a struggle. However, you can change ancillary processes and get impressive results in terms of your productivity, sys- tem efficiency, and improved engagement. The key to making adjustments—be it through technology or processes—is to make it manageable for the people who are working with the systems every day. The Best Approach The best approach for a bank looking to make technological advancements would be to do an internal audit of processes and equipment. If a new piece of equipment can complete a task faster, more efficiently, or more securely, you should look into it and assess the cost and the benefit. If a process can be automated through technology, it should also be considered. By automating and updating your process and technology, you increase the bandwidth of your IT employees. This allows them to take on tasks that will help advance your business instead of them working to maintain a “broken” system. It makes more sense to ask your IT staff for improvements that would make their jobs easier or more efficient. For example, many businesses continue to use physical tape. With the technological advances in storage, there are easily 10 other storage options that would allow a business to update their storage systemwithout disturbing the core process. Many people are also not utilizing auxiliary storage pools. You can add additional disk that is not built into the global disk, the perfect example of utilizing technology to improve your an- cillary process while leaving the core process the same. There is virtually no difference in the processing power, but your all-important core processes have not been altered. These are just two examples of ancillary improvement processes that can make big impacts on the efficiency of your systems. Other places for quick improvement could be upgrading to high-speed communication and making sure your switches are upgraded. If you are working with equipment that’s loaded with 16Gb switches, but your business systems can only handle 4 or 8 Gb, they never see the full capacity of a system. Organizational Benefits Don’t let yourself fall too far behind, the benefits of regularly updating your ancillary processes in order to better utilize updated technology are easy to assess. Simply put, efficiency and engagement are increased. One of the defining character- istics of some legacy systems is that they are reliable. However, humans thrive on learning new skills and tasks, especially when they make their jobs more efficient and meaningful. Making systemic updates a priority is a mission that will continue to serve businesses for years to come as they adopt it as a practice.  For more information, contact Tom Gleason Sales Manager, Dynamic Solutions International at 303-754-2087 or t.gleason@dynamicsolutions.com. Tomhas over 30 years of technology experience in the financial industry.