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CHAPTER 5 DISCUSSION
According to the previous chapter, five findings on the overall analysis are presented below.
Finding 1: Meet business needs－IT flexibility
IT managers and business managers have similar measurements toward post-merger IT integration.
With the fierce competition in Taiwan’s banking industry, the speed of releasing new financial products and services is very important. Hence, not only business units but also IT units must pay attention to the flexibility of post-merger information systems. This highlights the importance of a bank’s IT system, as there are so many services and financial products that rely upon it. For example, customers use online ATM or mobile banking. In these cases, business opportunities arise from IT technology development. As a result, losing market share, which means losing considerable competitiveness, might occur due to lack of IT support and effectiveness, which is it why it plays such a key role in the current banking industry. This measurement has not been enthusiastically emphasized in the past literature discussion, although it seems quite critical for an IT manager who is planning an integration. Flexibility must be taken into consideration in response to the rapid innovations within the competitive business-opportunity environment. To some extent, IT capability can influence how quickly a company can react to a newly initiated challenge from a competitor.
Finding 2: Improvement in value beyond cost savings on a post-merger IT integration
It is clear that IT managers are not particularly concerned with saving costs. This is highly correlated to the attributes of the banking industry. As we mentioned in previous chapters, the banking industry is a very competitive and volatile environment. Each bank wants to project an image of professionalism by delivering high-quality services to their customers. IT support, in this respect, takes on a very important role. This can be seen more clearly if we talk about the necessity and importance of business continuity. Furthermore, as banking operations must rely on mass, rapid, and sometimes complex calculations, the IT service provided to both internal and external customers is expected to be accurate, instead of being economical. This explains why IT managers placed their emphasis on other aspects rather than costs. Doing things correctly is much more important than doing things in an inexpensive way.
Finding 3: Carefully design the user interface and operation steps
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Currently, with the advance of web-banking technology, there are more and more customers using electronic financial services. From the interview results, customers showed a measurement about the possible change of a bank’s user interfaces, which is direct media interaction. This kind of human-computer interaction problem is hard to track and fix until a customer addresses the service desk. If the interface is unfriendly or the operation steps changed due to the integration, customers may become unhappy or frustrated, customer satisfaction declines, and the bank may lose market share. It seems that a habitual website and a user-friendly user interface have to take into concern for maintaining customers’ satisfaction while dealing with IT integration.
Finding 4: A chance for change
From the study, we can surmise that IT system-integration capability is still viewed as a passive concept. What we mean by “passive” is that most of the stakeholders, even the CIOs, believe that
“nothing is a good thing.” Let’s take user interface as an example. Both the service provider and consumers expect that no conversion effort would be considered a success. In fact, in an aggressive view, the synergy of the integration process of a merger case could possibly be revealed in many aspects. For example, with a larger scale of IT resources, including software and hardware, an improved allocation might lead to a better utilization of the existing resources. Furthermore, it is also possible to take advantage of this good timing to restructure the internal process of the company, which is expected to be continuously competitive. As a result, gaining the aggressive benefits of system integration might change people’s opinion toward the IT field, and even empower it while dealing with business strategy.
Finding 5: The interrelationship of measurement between stakeholders
To clearly clarify the interrelated measurements among stakeholders, the stakeholders are classified into three levels as Figure 1. The top level is CEO. The middle level is user including business manager and customer. The bottom level is CIO. From Figure 1, we discover some of the measurements are interrelated level by level. For example, the user level measurement such as
“operational continuity” and “the flexibility of the integrated system for new business” also shown in CIO’s measurement. These CIO measurements are driven by user level because information system plays as a supporting role to meet the user’s need. So does the measurement “achieving synergies”
shown in both CIO’s and business manager’s measurement. The business measurement is driven by the CEO’s measurement. Moreover, we discover that the user measurement may influence the CIO’s
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IT integration strategy from the interviews and Figure 1.To meet the customer’s measurement
“consistency of operation steps and user interface”, most of the CIOs take the information system with bigger user base rather than the advanced information system as their remain information system so that they can maintain the most user’s benefits in our four cases. This strategy makes the most of users pay less efforts to adapt to new system so that the operational errors and user resistance may decrease to the minimum. Last, the measurement of customer, “no right encroachment”, is a complementary effort which the non-IT department must take into concern and reference. To fulfill this customer requirement, it’s not merely the business of IT department but more heavily relies on the business unit to carefully maintain and arrange the customer right after a merger.
CEO
Achieving synergies Increasing market share
Business manager Achieving operational continuity
The flexibility of the integrated system for new business Achieving revenue synergies
Figure 1 Interrelation of measurement between different stakeholders Customer
Achieving operational continuity The accuracy of customer information
No right encroachment
Consistency of operation steps and user interface
CIO
Achieving operational continuity Achieving technology consolidation
Integrating IT within a desired time frame
The flexibility of the integrated system for new business
Customer-satisfaction index
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