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How Digital Process Innovation Can Influence Organisational Change In The Finance Sector

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The finance sector as we know it is being transformed by new technology. Digital innovation is everywhere, from Big Data to risk management software, and it’s all coming to change in the way that the sector is organised and run. NEX Optimisation are undergoing an ambitious project to use distributed ledger technology to provide a single source of truth regarding financial transactions. Their services (as well as selected third parties) can then be applied within this environment. This is just one example of how digital processes can be used to streamline regulatory and financial resources, and so we’ve taken a closer look at the impact digital process innovation is having on financial organisations around the world.

Integration

As globalisation continues at a rapid rate, the financial sector is under pressure to keep up with demand. Finance leaders are expected to orchestrate change by closely controlling how their finance systems work alongside other parts of the business. The concept is simple – the finance sector needs to be able to deliver insight and risk analysis around the world, which could see them becoming integrators of information in as little as three years. The strategy, budget, forecast, workforce management plan and capital expenditure plan all need to become more integrated in order for financial organisations to be global business services offering end-to-end solutions.

Demanding More From CFOs

As digital processes innovate and change the way that the finance industry operates, CFOs will be under more pressure to perform. Technology has already made it possible for real-time, event-driven updates to be delivered which is giving CFOs new opportunities. Among these opportunities is the chance for better understanding of the processes and wider finance systems that are currently in place. They will be able to quickly identify areas where there is room for improvement or new ways of working, including making processes more efficient or even outsourcing work where possible.

This increased understanding could see a demand for a new type of finance team emerging. According to industry experts, a broader range of skills is going to be required from finance teams in the near future. Finance employees will need to be able to analyse effectively and communicate their findings with the rest of the business, instead of simply relying on their accounting skills and qualifications. They’ll need to be able to spot reoccurring patterns and problems, as well as coming up with solutions to the problems that arise in this new digital age.

CFOs Must Continue To Innovate

At the moment, innovation within the financial sector is only just beginning. Already it’s shaking the industry and prompting finance leaders to question the structure of their organisations, as well as how to achieve their targets. It’s clear that, within the finance sector, technology is becoming a force for making processes more effective and efficient. CFOs will need to continue to innovate their processes in order to stay ahead of disruption and keep up with the latest technologies, otherwise they risk being left behind. As soon as 2020, innovation could be measured, just like other essential elements of the industry such as marketing and IT. This just goes to show how valuable digital process innovation is considered to be within the financial sector.

How to Improve Clinic Productivity

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Many people try to increase the profit margin of their practice by cutting services, increasing costs or hoping to sell supplemental products and services to generate more money. However, increasing the productivity of your practices without similarly increasing one’s operating costs or payroll is far more effective. Here are a few tips on how to improve clinic productivity. And note that we’ll ensure that our advice stays within the regulatory requirements that often interfere with clinic efficiency.

Map Your Workflow

The workflow is both the standard flow of patients through the practice and the flow of key personnel as they go through their duties. You want to identify causes of wasted time and effort, and there has been an influx of industrial engineers and Lean experts into the healthcare field to help you do exactly that.

Little things like walking from your office to patients’ rooms instead of from room to room take up non-value added time. Putting a work desk in a central location could eliminate this waste for both doctors and nurses. Adopting electronic medical records and having tablets that can always call them up (and places to charge them and update them as necessary) can streamline operations.

Mapping the billing cycle and patient checkout process could identify wasteful steps that could be combined, or tasks that could be handled assembly line style more quickly.

Only Do Work at Your Credential Level

Physician assistants were widely adopted because their initial checks of a patient’s heart rate, blood pressure, weight and other vitals saved a doctor several minutes per patient. This allowed doctors to see more patients per day. Make sure you aren’t asking doctors to do other, more mundane tasks instead of focusing on the diagnostic care only they provide. This can include sending prescriptions to the pharmacy, creating copies of informational brochures for patients, providing explanations on how to use newly prescribed inhalers and giving them information on how to connect with a referred healthcare provider.

Study your workflow to look for tasks that nurses and other staff can do like authorizing refills that don’t require a physician’s signature, or using nurse educators instead of having the doctor lecture those diagnosed with diabetes on how to live with their condition. Don’t have doctors do sonograms but instead hire techs from the best ultrasound technician schools to perform these procedures.

Set Up Patient Portals

 

Patient portals are websites where patients can view their health records, see reminders for appointments and schedule their next visit. They reduce the need to call patients to discuss test results and allows them to email questions that nurses could answer in a timely manner, or that the doctor can answer when there is free time, which is certainly a more efficient way to do things. Don’t forget to ask patients to upload critical forms like ‘do not resuscitate orders’ and medical power of attorney documents so that your staff don’t have to scramble for them in an emergency.

Improving your clinic efficiency is possible if you follow some of the tips in this article. Doing something simple as mapping your workflow or delegating things like sonography could improve your productivity instantly.

What Are The Best Ways To Get Online Exposure for New Products and Services?

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The success of any business, or product, depends directly on social influence and exposure gains. More exposure means that more people see what you have to offer, and why your business or product is a better choice than your competitors. Here are the best ways you can raise your online exposure profile.

Social Media Marketing

If your company does not have a Facebook, Twitter and Instagram page, you are missing out an important part of your marketing strategy and a huge opportunity for growth. Social media has grown in importance in the online marketing world significantly in the past ten years, and it has the power to reform the rankings of successful businesses and put yours at the top. Being able to reply individually to all customers – whether they are reviewing your service or product, sharing a complaint, or asking a question  – will show that you really make time for your clients, and care more about them than the contents on their bank account. Google+ has also gained a lot of traction in the past couple of years and is able to rival the daily users of even the dominant social media page Facebook. Having eye-catching titles that come out on top of a Google search for your specific niche will encourage more customers to try your product than someone further down the list. There is also the opportunity to do competitions and promotions across your social media accounts, where the conditions are sharing the pages and following all accounts that your company have to offer. Therefore promoting your business, without having to spend the time physically sharing it.

Blogger Outreach

Getting as many positive reviews about both your brand and products out there as possible will be a great way of gaining exposure. Get a positive review on a high traffic website, and you’ll see your sales rocket. Professional journalists or bloggers tend to have a loyal following of readers that will trust their reviews and recommendations, and if they have a large following, you will be able to reach a mass amount of people overnight. However, it can give you an endless stream of work if you are approaching bloggers individually and the promotion of your company could potentially read too much like an advert, turning off interested customers. Luckily, there are companies that help to bridge the gap between your business and the blog websites; simply reading through a review of FATJOEs Blogger Outreach Service will show you how simple it can be to reach your market, without doing all the legwork yourself. Companies that offer these services have creative writers that work your link in by using a natural, non-affiliated, anchor text in a guest blog catered to the host blog’s style, to ensure it isn’t overly promotional.

Create YouTube Videos Showing Off Your Products and Services

Not only can you embed any videos you make onto your website, but the comments section allows for further feedback from your customers. The videos themselves will allow potential customers to have a more in-depth look at your products and can be very persuasive if you manage to weave in a strong sales pitch. Customers can also gain a greater understanding of your services if you create a video addressing some common questions. If you have a unique style or way of doing things, you can display that here. It’s a chance to be personable with people who are interested to know more about your business, so keep it friendly and engaging.

There are many more ways to gain online exposure for your business, but these examples above are the most surefire way of increasing your visibility online.

How to Encourage the Sharing of Information in Your Team

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Building a team is not always an easy thing to do. Not only do you need to find people who share common goals, but you need people who each bring something unique to the table. Unfortunately, the corporate environment has not always been one that fostered working well together, and so these two factors alone are insufficient for putting together a team willing to share information. In order to overcome this obstacle, it is first necessary to look at why we have so much trouble sharing what we know and then to find ways to encourage the sharing of information.

The Down Side of a Competitive Spirit

A little bit of competition is a good thing, but when that competitive drive to reach the top at all costs consumes you, it can be detrimental to working well in a team. Some people are overly competitive from a very early age, indeed, even toddlers are seen vying for mom’s attention. They will strike out at each other, bite, kick, scratch and scream their lungs out to be the one mom sees first. You might say this is normal behavior in a child that young and you might be right if it isn’t taken to extremes and if it is corrected by an astute mother.

But what of highly knowledgeable professionals who will do anything to claw their way up the corporate ladder? Have they somehow gotten themselves stuck in a juvenile mentality in terms of how they handle competition? This is the personality type that will work very hard to guard the information they have and will only share bits and pieces on a need to know basis. However, that could hold up a team for weeks, if not months or years if the information they are sitting on is a vital piece of a process that can’t continue unless all the pieces are fit together in tandem.

What You Can Do As Team Leader

After weeding out candidates who simply won’t be good team players, you are left with a group of individuals who, although willing to work together, may never have been briefed on the importance of sharing their piece of the pie. Understanding that you are working with individuals, sometimes it helps to have a non-confrontational way in which they can share what they have without fearing negative reactions of others in the group.

Some corporations even encourage team members to blog about their research on sites like presscave.com where you can write under a pseudonym if you want honest comments from other team members to whom you remain anonymous. There’s no threat there!

Some Companies Are Setting up Teams in the Cloud

Many companies have gone to setting up work spaces in the Cloud. Each team member is given access to the area he or she needs to work in and that is where they will leave what it is they know and where they expect to be within a given timeframe. These group spaces can be set up in a number of ways, either through dissemination of information through email, an online ‘conference room,’ or even a chat room where members can speak with select individuals, rather than the entire team, if that’s what they prefer.

In other words, by working in the Cloud you can meet briefly if need be, leave information for other team members to work through when they have time, and even access when they need your piece of the puzzle. This will often break down barriers so that team members have a sense of security when dealing with others.

The best way to encourage the sharing information is to provide a non-confrontational setting for the dissemination of knowledge. Most often, that space is in the Cloud.

6 Tips to Protect Your Business from Identity Theft

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Identity theft is becoming an increasing concern for people, with major data breaches becoming a normal part of our daily news cycle. In fact, it is safe to say that your information is probably somewhere out in the void, just waiting for somebody to pick it up and start using it. This is not an exaggeration, this is just the unfortunate reality we have to deal with today.

As a business owner, you are most likely to be targeted by potential identity thieves not as an individual, but as a source. Your databases can be breached leaving all of your customers vulnerable, and putting your face on the news in a way you never wanted. To help protect your business from being targeted for identity theft, we offer six easy solutions to safeguard your company and your customers.

Secure Your Computer Infrastructure

Having a strong firewall and running anti-virus on a regular basis will save your company potential damage. There is an endless arms race running between security companies and hackers every second, and patches to anti-virus software are the only way for us to keep up. Failing to update your anti-virus is like refusing to cancel a lost credit card: you’re just asking for somebody to steal from you.

Change Passwords Regularly

Breaking into an account takes time, but it can be done. If you have been using the same password for the past five years that is more than enough time for somebody to have used brute force to figure out what it is. Adopt a policy of changing passwords at least once every three months, and do not use the same password in more than one place. This will foil brute force attempts to steal information. Require the same routine of your staff as well!

Compartmentalizing Customer Information

The information of your customers should remain on a need-to-know basis at all times. Identity thieves will often exploit your staff to attempt to pull customer information from them. Ensure that your staff only has the bare minimum customer information they need to do their job: they can’t reveal what they don’t know after all. Using identity verification techniques that minimize the exposure of confidential information ensures that the cause of identity theft is not somebody who works for you. Third-party identity verification services such as Cognito can help limit exposure to sensitive information.

Use Dedicated Devices

Do not let employees use their own devices for work related purposes. While employees mean well, their personal devices could be compromised in ways you cannot account for. So, make sure you have a clear distinction between work devices and personal devices. If an employee needs to work from home, the best option is to provide a device for them to use for work. At work, having a dedicated terminal for sensitive functions (like banking) will limit that terminal’s exposure to viruses and other ways to compromise it.

Educate Your Employees

The weakest link in any security arrangement is the human link. Educating your employees on proper security protocols can help reduce your business’s risk. Education is not perfect, but instilling a culture of good security practices will go a long way towards safeguarding your employees and customers from theft.

Insurance

If all else fails – making sure you have good insurance will protect your business from the fallout. No matter how much you work to protect your customers, a few will inevitably fall through the cracks. Having insurance will allow you to make it right with your customers without destroying your business.

Protect Your Customers, Protect Your Business

Remember that identity theft is, for the most part, preventable. While you cannot do anything about other companies that fail in their obligations, you can do something about your business. Following these steps will protect both yourself and your customers from the perils of identity theft and fraud.