| Author: | Lo, Po-san Joyce |
| Title: | Awareness of business process improvement opportunities through IT : a study of the Hong Kong consumer/retail banking |
| Other Title: | Awareness of business process improvement opportunities through information technology |
| Degree: | M.Sc. |
| Year: | 1996 |
| Subject: | Banks and banking -- China -- Hong Kong -- Data processing Information technology Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Department of Computing |
| Pages: | ix, 209, [31] leaves : ill. (some col.) ; 30 cm |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Banks in Hong Kong are operating in a very competitive environment. The bank-to-population ratio is high. Customers are no longer loyal to one bank as they previously did. Customers demand better quality services with lower pricing. To the bank, costs are high and profit margins are narrowed. It is a general target of a bank to gain competitive advantage over competitors through offering better services. These better services must be realized by improving the core business processes. And it is well realized such can be achieved well by reengineering the business processes. The theme of the dissertation is to conduct a study combining the case study and survey methods on the process improvement of five critical business processes of consumer/retail banking in licensed banks of Hong Kong. In Chapter one detailed objectives, scope and significance of this project, together with the assumption and limitation were explained. There are several reasons for undertaking this project. Successes of IT-enabled process improvement experienced by banks in the U.S. and Europe reveal the direction for bank competition. In Hong Kong, customers' demand for high quality services and removal of regulatory barriers have led to fierce competition. It is imperative that banks must improve their processes to offer better services in order to survive and succeed. The starting point is to know where one stands and to explore the factors hindering improvement and to recognize what tools are available to enable the improvements. A discussion on the environment and the problems of banking in general and consumer/retail banking in particular was put forward in Chapter two. A general description with some statistics on the spending and utilization of information technology by banks worldwide were collected. Finally, the natural tie of the banking industry to improve their business processes to gain dramatic improvements through IT-enabled re-engineering was discussed in the chapter. The literature were reviewed and collected in Chapter three. The chapter was subdivided into the following headings: - IT's role in business process improvement - Identify the critical success factors and inhibitors of business process improvement - Stages of business process improvement - Definitions of Automation, BPR, TQM and Virtual Banking - What is not BPR? - Identify IT for BPR The research methodology adopted in this project and the reasons of choosing an integrated approach as well as a detailed description of the method used were delineated in Chapter four. In the same chapter, five core business processes in CR banking in Hong Kong were also identified. A detailed description of a four-stage model was documented. The model was developed by the author for the purpose of positioning the status of process improvement in the core processes of the consumer/retail banking Chapter five covered the case study, Chapter six contained the data analysis and Chapter seven the statistical analysis. In the case study, five core processes identified in chapter four were examined in detail and an overall status of stage one (local automation) was concluded for the organization studied. Critical success factors and inhibitors to process improvements were discovered. IT suitable for the improvement of processes were found. This case study shed further light to the formation of the questionnaire used for the survey. Data collected from the survey were analyzed in Chapter six. The results provided preliminary answers to the questions raised in the three objectives: - that banks in Hong Kong have not embarked in IT-enabled BPR to improve their core business processes. - that although many of the important criteria such as top management support, business vision are present, there are a number of factors which banks have to resolve before they feel comfortable to radically improve their business processes. - that suitable ITs for process improvement and their capabilities are in general known to the senior management. In Chapter seven, advanced statistical methods such as chi-square and correlation analysis were employed to test the hypotheses on a number of variables. The results are: - the importance of the factors for process improvements applies to all bank alike despite their size and their source of capital. - the size and the source of capital did not affect the degree of usage of ITs. Nor the source of capital has any relationship with the status of process improvements. The final chapter of this dissertation, Chapter eight, covered the following aspects: - summarized the conclusions of the case study and survey in resolving the questions raised in chapter one - contributions to the banking sector were explained, namely a) arouse interest of senior management of the banks b) identified major obstacles to process improvement in banking c) made known or add familiarity to banking sector the disruptive power of IT tools for implementation of radical business process improvement - contributions to methodology were explained, namely: a) add to the empirical data another successful integration of multiple method research b) validated the advantages of supplementing a questionnaire survey with a case study such as: i) serve as a source of input to the survey instrument ii) aid in interpreting the results of the data collected in the survey iii) test the validity and reliability through comparing the survey results from case study findings - proposals for future research were stated a) to develop a blow by blow program to re-engineer core business processes in any bank b) to test and re-apply the concept of the four-stage model developed by the author to other banking processes or to other types of organization c) to explore and discover ways to overcome the inhibitors identified |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
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|---|---|---|---|---|
| b12349719.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 11.16 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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