Towards this end, HCL has developed a set of propositions that are designed to help banks carry to ensure the seamless execution of their day to day operations. These concepts encompass IOMC, Production Management and Target Operating Model (TOM)

HCL’s Integrated Operations and Management Centre (IOMC) integrates offerings across Global Services, Infrastructure Operations and Application Operations. It acts as a single window to deliver, manage and monitor Infrastructure Support and Application Operations giving customers increased efficiencies and enhanced business impact. Multi-integrated solutions enable customers achieve significant optimization not only within one area but also at interface points (viz integrated help-desk for applications and infrastructure).

HCL’s Target Operating Model (TOM) is the physical implementation of the Managed Service Model for delivering application development, production, maintenance, and user support. It is a collection of standardized processes integrated with standard tool sets, industry best practices, and HCL organizational enablers for ensuring business alignment, competitive advantage, centres of excellence focus, and continuous improvement.

The following are the salient features of the HCL TOM:

• Integrated service lines implementing managed services for application production, maintenance and user support
• Scalable separate service lines for L1, L2, and L3 activities. Resources aggregation at the level of individual application to form the virtual application level team 
• Resources can be moved across service lines and applications to ensure maximum utilization, knowledge management, peak load management, and contingency management
• Establishment of global service desks for L1 support in alignment with individual business line, located at onsite locations.  Implementation of L1 support at onsite to ensure business alignment, domain leadership, and synergy with business transformation agenda
• Readiness to engage a thin Client retained organization, primarily focused on demand management requirements management, customer relations, and client specific issues coordination.  HCL is experienced and is well positioned to address rebadging of employees if required
  

The questions that we all face, and want to look at are; where is it all going, and which methodology and delivery system really works best? Easy payment translates to larger sales and a greater instance of impulse purchasing. We all know that if you make the purchasing process easy and remove any thought of how much you are spending then the tendency is to spend more.

Credit cards have been a boon to impulse spending. They allow people to expand their purchasing power and manage their personal cash flow to maximum effect. The growth of the Internet as a secure (somewhat) medium for transaction handling and communications expanded the use of credit cards by providing a comprehensive infrastructure over which data could flow. With that, and in conjunction with the credit card infrastructure, we saw the rise of the World Wide Web as a vehicle for accepting
payments and the rise of the online payment industry subset.

Enter the cell phone - the increasingly ubiquitous consumer communication device that has grown to become more than a mere phone. The rise of the cell phone as a key piece of personal technology will continue to grow; its use as a payment device seems an inescapable and inevitable extension to its utility.

Mobile banking is a concept that was recognized a long time back more so as a convenience for existing customers. It was seen mostly as a ‘cost’ centre. Many banks across the globe were very hesitant to adopt the idea. This could be due to the fact that banks too perceived it as a value adds to the customer but a cost to themselves. The smaller banks were waiting patiently to see the response of some services taken up by the lead banks.
There are a host of value added services that can be made available through mobile banking. I have tried and analysed some of the most used services. However, there shall be, with the advancement of technology many more services that may be made available. These services can be broadly categorised into four types:
• Account Access Services
• Event Based Services
• Financial Transactions and Payments
• Mobile Retailing

In addition Market researcher Gartner has pinpointed the top ten consumer mobile applications consumers will be using and downloading in the year 2012. The most popularly used applications will include those designed to facilitate mobile money transfers, location-based services and mobile search said Gartner in its November 18, 2009 report.

And for essential priorities in the Infrastructure domain, we also have a Green Data Center Strategy.  This relies on the Service philosophy of Partner owned datacenter to provide “Right Shore” hosting and migration capabilities with the ability to provide seamless Global delivery. Green IT initiatives can be taken along the following three dimensions of a datacenter namely Technology, Facility and Management. Our suite of Green Datacenter Services helps Enterprise IT organizations reduce their companies’ environmental impact by assessing, planning, and implementing initiatives around their Datacenter environment. And by doing so, we have helped many Fortune/Global 1000 organizations to walk this green path.

HCL has been pioneering the thought leadership on Web2.0 since its humble beginnings, since blogs. Today, we offer FIRST2.0® - a suite of end-to-end engineering services to any software product or service company, which wants to harness the true power of the Web 2.0.
Our value proposition lies in our five-fold mantra that comprises five pillars, namely, faster time to market, Innovation Framework, Redefined User Experience, and Services on Demand and Transformational value.

HCL’s 10 years’ mature SAP practice has been recognized with “ Distinguished Partner Award by SAP”, “Best Implementation/ Upgrade Award” by SAP, “ Best myHCM Implementation” Award and “ Distinguished Partner in NetWeaver” award by SAP. HCL has contributed heavily in the SAP space by continuously writing and publishing white papers in various forums. We have published white papers in the area of Service Oriented Architecture, NetWeaver, Web Services and Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture.

Forrester recommended HCL SAP offering as ‘Strong’, and an especially ‘good fit’ for buyers looking for a ‘partner with global capabilities’ and NewWeaver capabilities:

They spoke of us as:

• A vendor who can provide highly customized modules or solutions

• A vendor with a track record of strong SAP engagements

• Having a strong offering in application and infrastructure support

Some of the largest investments organizations are making are in the lines of transformative initiatives. While some organizations also tend to believe that mergers and acquisitions, system upgrades, organizational restructuring etc is transformation, quite apparently it is not; not even the beginning of it. In order to transform, a vision backed by well articulated objectives and initiatives, forms the foundation.  And here is when, identifying a value-enhancing IT strategy becomes an important step towards realizing the innovative power of the organization.

The value orientation at HCL ensures that we stay focused on ushering transformation in our engagements. The Enterprise Transformation Services is a trend setter and consists of carefully chosen premium service offerings which will help clients, in each of the verticals, realize benefits of transformation. Partnering with our customers for Business, Technology, Application and Data Transformation across the engagement lifecycle has always been an emphasis for growth for us. Besides strengthening our relationship with existing customers through this new line of business, it also gives us access to new markets and customers.

Under the current economic situation where the IT budgets are southbound, every IT initiative has to address a business imperative. A business aligned IT approach bridges the gap between IT services delivery and business process requirements by focusing on process cycle times. The efficiency of a business process is determined by its cycle time that in turn is determined by the availability and performance of the underlying business services.

In essence, Business Aligned IT is a collaborative approach with the customer to reduce business costs by continually tracking and analyzing real time metrics that improve business process cycle times.

Yet customer onboarding lags behind other business processes in both the quality of customer experience and costs. Lack of attention towards customer onboarding results in customers abandoning the application process, loss of customers, regulatory fines and damage to the corporate brand. Best practices have addressed these issues through improved transaction management with enterprise content management (ECM) technologies, the use of rich Internet applications, adoption of e-signatures, better distributed capture, red flag compliance and a transition to a client-centric onboarding strategy. Applying these best practices — especially during a deep economic downturn — can help business process and apps professionals save money and even help push green IT forward.

And the simple act of calling or sending a letter to new customers to thank them for their business and explain the features of the product they just purchased can go a long way in ensuring their satisfaction. In many aspects, developing a customer relationship isn’t very different from developing a personal relationship. There has to be some mutual trust, mutual benefit, and some degree of engagement.

Business development, financial investment, regulation, and government policy making rely on establishing representative benchmarks, and accurately forecasting their trajectories over time or in relation to other variables. This can be challenging when the environment is turbulent, and benchmark trajectories display erratic behaviour.

Under such conditions traditional forecasting methods and trend projections involving statistical analysis of historical data, fundamental analysis, or expert judgment can be unreliable. This is an increasingly important issue as Globalisation, with its inherent linkages and dependencies can lead to turbulence or chaotic conditions.

It would be appropriate to gain an understanding of the various decision making models that have been developed in order to possibly predict the future with a semblance of accuracy while still leaving a large portion of it up to the unknown. The article in the 4th anniversary edition of Communique covers the intricacies of the World 3 Model, Mental Model, Balance Score Card Model, iThink™ model amongst many others and tries to chart a rational middle ground between overt optimism and callous cynicism.

Production Support involves problems, solutions, people, changes, deadlines and all the things that go into making a moment critical…all this when the system is live!! You must have heard about the mechanic who was removing the cylinder heads from the motor of a car when he spotted the famous heart surgeon in his shop standing off to the side, waiting for the service manager to come to take a look at his car.  The mechanic shouted across the garage, “Hello Doctor!! Please come over here for a minute.” The famous surgeon, a bit surprised, walked over to the mechanic. The mechanic straightened up, wiped his hands on a rag and asked argumentatively, “So doctor, look at this. I also open hearts, take valves out, grind ‘em, put in new parts, and when I finish this will work as a new one. So how come you get the big money, when you and me is doing basically the same work? “The doctor leaned over and whispered to the mechanic….. He said: “Try to do it when the engine is running”.

This is exactly how crucial Production Support is. The support services provided are all during run time. And this calls for a well defined, mature production support management process. At HCL we offer custom production support services over a broad spectrum of technology areas spanning from client server applications, object-oriented software, internet or intranet applications to legacy applications.

The goal of production support is to provide a highly usable and highly available customer system and rapid responses to the user problems; all this while ensuring the system is still available to the other users with undisrupted services. And several activities comprise this goal; a help desk, application level support, hardware support and network support. This goal is our process. All processes have a distinct beginning, middle and end and also comprise a set of process steps. And in all processes in this age of customer centricity, the obvious starting point is mapping these steps out from the customers’ perspective.

 In production support, these steps involve various teams and resources and the responsibilities are very crucial and widely distributed. These steps include – problem management, incidents management, processing of incidents, resolution, root cause analysis and interaction in runtime while the application is live. And these activities at different levels involve various teams like the help desk team, technical support team, the specialist team, application development team and various other teams.  And an effective production support team should be able to capture, report, analyze, track and resolve issues.

But at these times, an organization cannot create value not just by following an effective system but by monitoring and improving the execution of the process steps. This will result in eliminating the need for particular inputs, minimizing the responsibility of the customer, addressing an overlooked step etc..At HCL, this continuous monitoring and improvement has helped us develop a managed services model with well defined SLAs and metrics, increased focus on joint governance and program management, program manager enabling unbiased transition to new model and a minimized customer retained organization.