SharePoint is undoubtedly a powerful tool, used by many within the Financial Services and Insurance industry. In order to make sure you get the most from it, it has to be efficient and it has to be fast.
We talk to John Shaw, Sales Director of our partner company Yeven Consulting to find what they are doing to help improve their customers SharePoint application.
1.) How do Yeven Consulting help companies achieve operational efficiency and cost reduction?
Whether it is necessary to increase capacity with the same headcount or service the same business with less, operationally the organisation needs to have systems that will increase efficiency, productivity and effectiveness.
Yeven Consulting help configure SharePoint and by automating processes with tailored workflow, this enables efficiencies to be gained and exploited which in turn lead to cost reductions.
2.) Obviously the Financial Services/Insurance sector is under immense pressure to provide regulatory reporting. Is this something that companies are using SharePoint for?
In this tightly regulated sector it is vitally important to ensure that all customer facing documentation is properly produced, controlled and auditable. So yes, more and more insurance companies are using SharePoint as a key technology for storing and managing documents and reports critical to achieving full compliance.
3.) What are the common problems that you often encounter thanks to poorly implemented SharePoint solutions?
SharePoint is a framework and therefore offers a vast number of implementation options, there are potentially an infinite number of issues. However in our experience there are a number of common problems which arise from poorly implemented SharePoint solutions:
- Infrastructures – both in terms of the physical architecture (i.e. was it a scripted and repeatable implementation?) and the logical architecture (i.e. how has the site structure been implemented?)
- Security – what security model has been implemented? Is it based on Active Directory?
- Information architecture – the way in which information is stored across the system – is it easily accessible? Is it consistently stored?
- Customisations – have applications been implemented using out of the box functionality (85% achievable out of the box)? Has custom code been written? How has the code been developed and deployed?
- 3rd Party Tools – have third party tools been used? Is their roadmap in line with SharePoint?
4.) Why is it important that SharePoint is integrated with systems used within other parts of the business?
Although SharePoint can provide an immense amount of functionality, there will be scenarios where line of business applications are a more cost effective solution. SharePoint can however be configured to provide an interface to these line of business applications in terms of:
- Enterprise search – enabling the organisation to search not only SharePoint but line of business applications, file shares and external sources, providing a one stop shop for finding information
- Document management – SharePoint can integrate to existing line of business applications and provide the full lifecycle for document management
- Consistent look and feel – using SharePoint as the gateway to see all line of business applications whilst maintaining a consistent look and feel
- Business Intelligence – using SharePoint to integrate information from multiple system provides a platform to offer business intelligence