Business reinvention means more than doing things better, or even doing them differently. It means radically changing the rules by which an industry operates. In reinventing its business, Fidelity ...has created a multichannel approach to broaden customer reach. In the financial services industry the best examples of growth are generally nonbanks, such as Advanta, T. Rowe Price, EDS, and GE Capital. These companies have been developing and offering new types of products and reaching new segments of customers in ways not foreseen by traditional banking. Business reinvention is a fundamental reshaping of relationships, both within an organization and between institutions. Like reengineering, it focuses on a product, processes, and customers, but then it goes beyond reengineering to reevaluate and redistribute roles among all value chain participants.
Typically, financial services firms have not connected IT projects to customer priorities or to the P&L statement. Assumptions about customer adoption or purchase rates for new capabilities or ...products tend to be rooted in hope rather than fact. For example, a telecommunications company intended to invest large sums to support an online service and ordering system for its business customers. When we conducted a quick survey, we found that only 9% of this company's business customers were "digital ready" to use the ordering capabilities being developed. Connect the dots. Determining how well your IT portfolio fits with your business objectives will allow you to make some rapid decisions for improvement. What customer adoption rates are required to reap the expected benefits? How do projects link to revenue and cost lines in the P&L? By making these connections, it is often possible to eliminate or redirect 20% or more of IT projects in a matter of weeks. And since many companies do not have this information readily available, the exercise can prompt both business and IT managers to evaluate their projects more rigorously.
Both exercise testing and C-reactive protein (CRP) serum levels have been shown to predict clinical events in patients with unstable angina. However, no previous study carefully compared their ...relative prognostic value in this clinical setting.
We reviewed data of 96 consecutive patients with unstable angina (77 males, 19 females, mean age 63.1 +/- 9.5 years), who were free from clinical events during hospital stay. A symptom/sign-limited treadmill exercise test had been performed and CRP serum levels had been measured prior to discharge in all patients.
During an average follow-up of 2.5 years (range 0.5-5 years), there were 8 major cardiac events (death or myocardial infarction) and 11 patients had recurrent unstable angina. Both exercise-induced myocardial ischemia relative risk (RR) 3.02, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.58-15.5, p = 0.29, and CRP levels > or = 10 mg/l (RR 2.4, 95% CI 0.51-11.2, p = 0.25) showed a non significant association with major cardiac events. Low workload ischemia, however, was significantly associated with major cardiac events (RR 8.58, 95% CI 1.66-44.2, p = 0.01) and was also the only predictive variable for the combined endpoint of major events and recurrent angina (RR 2.57, 95% CI 1.02-4.44, p = 0.045). Among patients with low workload ischemia, the occurrence of major events was higher in those with high, compared to those with low, CRP levels, but the difference was not significant (28.6 vs 15.4%, p = 0.64).
In this study, pre-discharge myocardial ischemia at low workload was the single most important predictor of major cardiac events during long-term follow-up among patients with stabilized unstable angina. Increased serum CRP levels did not add further significant prognostic information in this specific group of patients with unstable angina, although this issue needs to be addressed in larger studies.
Banks tend to approach data-driven marketing as if it is the Normandy invasion-marshalling resources to build huge data warehouses and restructure organizations from top to bottom to "focus on the ...customer." But as important as these initiatives are, they must not detract from a bank's ability to act quickly and decisively. Modest applications of data- driven marketing are the best first steps to success, and examples like the one that follows bear this out. At a major retail bank, which will remain anonymous in this article, executives were certain that a newly created telemarketing center was vastly superior to branches for selling a range of banking products. Sales reports showed that telephone reps were achieving good sales rates.
