Be Ready and Be Suitable

What is Suitable? There is one proverb that says all that is white is not milk. The iceberg is deeper below the sea than what meets the eye.

There is another that says that suitable is how you define it. One has to adjust to become suitable. We can make a perfectly logical argument hazy by bringing is perfectly reasonable sayings....but would we need a mirror to see the wound on the palms.

...again examples for life apply to it's constituents, what is relevant for the esoteric is relevant for the real too...like say IT projects.

At a philosophic level every body can do everything, after all the boundaries are defined by us but that is for the future, the current should be well defined particularly when the problem is known. What we have on hand is what we have what we do not is what will cause us pain. We need to define boundaries for the needs and assess how to bridge it?

The most important thing that one needs to do is constantly learn so that when an opportunity comes one is there to help and make oneself useful. It is what we offer to make life simpler and not what we get out of an opportunity. If there are things that needs to be learned so be it, we can cross a stream but we cannot build a boat to cross the seas a day before the travel. We cannot start arms practicing during the War - we cannot do 'Yuddha Kale Shastrabhyasa!'

An IT infrastructure is simple but critical - particularly when applied to mission critical applications like Banking - but one has to have a deep understanding of the fundamentals. A person playing with toy gun cannot lead a war let along participate in it. There could be hierarchies and escalation paths for resolving the unknown but the person who does not know the concept or feels it  is not in his or her scope of learning is irrelevant and if involved in the project a pure nuisance. All lies will eventually get caught.

The next important thing is professionalism, not in the conventional sense that is taught in management classes but just to the extent of being reliable. This is independant of the sourroundings and is a reflection of integrity. Integrity comes out in program code and can be caught in code reviews, in the quality of comments, quality of defining the scenario and if probed a litte more than normal in the articulation of a solution.

In my opinion suitability cannot be faked for long. In the short haul however all involved will struggle.

I am writing this as an observation of a situation. There are solutions and most problems can be solved but better solve it before than later.

..The Real Retail Banking..

This has been there from the time we remember in a formal organized way but it is only now that the retail customers are getting empowered. There are two reasons for this I think a) Technology - Among others giving them some power can push them out of the branch and save real estate and manpower costs b) There is competition - particularly banks breaking country barriers to acquire reliable customers.

However for some reason retail banking customers are treated as simplistic non sophisticated users who are not trusted with features. The UI in retail Internet banking is restrictive if not condescending. Even if there are some tools it is in the mode of creating additional revenue stream or to get insight into their data and not to provide independant insight into finances. While a bank would be careful enough to prevent corruption of their data there is an opportunity for the banks to provide user fields that can be in control of the retail customers only the data store can be on the servers. This data should be maintainable and downloadable in some standard formats.

The benefits can be quite startling. A bank statement can be reviewed online and the download criteria can be defined. This is better then downloading the data and uploading this to another application to segregate.

Similar infrastructure can be provided by the banks to associate classifications (not just the comments ) at the source of a transaction that can provide classification on the nature of transactions. This can be directly fed to the tax calculation data among others.

By just providing flexibility in the way a statement can be downloaded and providing options for transaction classification a considerable customer delight can be achieved for a tech savvy customer. Options to integrate the different accounts, providing cash forecast methods are additional bonus.

Think about the amount of small scale applications that can be built by third parties by empowering these transactions.