The Customer:

An agricultural development bank in South Africa.

The Challenge:

In recent years, the focus of the bank has been broadened to include the development goals of the government by extending loans to special category of borrowers and new entrepreneurs. Also, there has been increased competition in commercial lending, and the bank's position is continually challenged by few aggressive commercial banks. With this changing business scenario, the bank felt that the current IT infrastructure would not support the launch of new products and delivery channels. It felt the need for efficient servicing of growing business/customer volumes, as well as the possession of superior MIS capabilities for better monitoring of risk.

The objective of the Strategic IT Planning exercise for the bank was to:

	develop an IT plan and roadmap that aligns technology with the business plan of the bank
	create IT architecture to meet the current and future requirements of businesses
	establish the requirement of various business users and prioritize these requirements

The project was carried out in two phases:

Phase I: Business requirements and analysis of current systems

Phase II: Formulation of an IT plan.

Recommended Solution:

It was recommended that IT is required to play a more strategic role by enabling the business to address the customer, and to operate efficiently and effectively. Various desirable IT initiatives to support these business needs were identified.

The study also resulted in a product matrix encapsulating large number of inflexible product types into a small number of flexible products.

The evaluation of current systems was undertaken. The various alternatives to overcome the constraints faced by key business users were evaluated on the basis of the following:

	high contribution to business objectives
	lower investment requirement and costs
	shorter time frame for implementation
	low business risk in implementation
	protection of existing investments

The future technical architecture and roadmap for implementation was also defined.

Customer Benefits

This solution would bring to the bank the much needed capability to address the constraints faced in the existing solution, and also face the business challenges of future, e.g., technological support to various delivery channels for product delivery and information dissemination (internet/mobile banking). The solution would aid in impact analysis of its development projects, and in measuring product profitability, customer profitability and monitoring of risk. The other benefits of this exercise will be to:

	facilitate business process re-engineering
	development of a robust IT infrastructure to meet future requirements