Introduction
Macquarie Group is a company which mainly operates on bank. Macquarie offers capital market and advisory, funds management, financing, research, trading and hedging, and also retail the financial services (Macquarie.com, 2017). Worldwide customers are being served by Macquarie Group. In the year 1969, Hill Samuel from Australia has inaugurated the door of Macquarie Group along with three staffs. The main aim of the company was to provide banking services that are investment and advisory in the Australian market.
This report highlights the background of the Macquarie Company which has its head quarter in Sydney. The current process of the company is described in this report showing the gaps in the processes. The issues that are to be fixed in the company and the criteria those are to be used for the requirements. This report also sheds light on the need of Information Strategy System and the difficulties to develop Strategic System in an organization.
Background of the Study
The Macquarie Company was founded in the year 1969 and has its head quarter in Sydney in Australia. The Macquarie Group is a company which provides financial services in Australia, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and America (Demirer et al, 2017). All the operations that are held in Macquarie Group are carried out by MAM (Macquarie Asset Management), CAF (Corporate and Asset Finance), Macquarie Capital Segments, BFS (Banking and Financial Services), and CGM (Commodities and Global Markets). The MAM segment of the company mainly specifies the real estate, energy, infrastructure, and real estate through private funds, partnerships, accounts that are separately managed, co-investments and private investments (Harris, Nassios & Giesecke, 2017). The MAM of Macquarie also provides solutions of security investment management that includes income, infrastructure securities, solution of multi asset allocation, infrastructure securities, hedge funds, and currencies and fixed income. This also provides some solutions about investments which consist of products that are fund linked, capital protected investments and also solutions based on agricultural investments (Klusak, Alsakka & Ap Gwilym, 2017). The CAF segment of Macquarie Group offers solutions for the capital and also for financial sectors via secondary transactions and primary transactions.
The CAF also provides solutions to asset finance that is needed in aircraft, technology, manufacturing, rail, mining equipment, healthcare, motor vehicles, industrial, rail, energy and many more. The BFS helps the company to provide banking products, credit cards, transaction, save accounts and mortgages (Frankel & Schreger, 2016). It also provides services like cash management, superannuation products, and investments, stockbroking, private banking and also can deposit pay and lend solutions and also helps to tailor services to all the clients involved in business. The Commodities and Global Markets of Macquarie give an offering an end to end services across all the global markets which include fixed income, commodities, foreign exchange, and equities. The capital segment of Macquarie has finance advisory and services of capital market to the government clients and the corporate clients who are involved in private acquisitions and mergers, fund raising in equity and debt, raising equity private and also corporate restricting.
Operations and Functionality
Current Process
The work of Macquarie Group is to act as investment intermediary for the corporate, retail clients, institutional and government and also counter parties around world that generates income by giving a wide range of services and products to their clients (Allen & Pryke, 2016). The Macquarie Group has established a leading position in the market serving as a specialist in commodities and resources, financial institutions, real estate, infrastructure and energy globally in the whole world. The company has developed a great knowledge in the financial market of Asia-Pacific.
Gaps in the processes
The gaps that are involved in the company allows Macquarie to handle all the problems and challenges that are company is facing and will be facing in future. These gaps help the company to handle the process faster, cheaper and in a better way. The gaps that arise in the company are:
- Handle the division between general ledger and system of loan servicing- The systems that handles the servicing system mainly covers the lifecycle of loan and the address questions that includes what is the balance of the customer’s loan, how much the payment is done and which portion of the amount is involved in principle and what is the interest (Psaros & Seamer, 2015).
- Address the disconnect in between modelers and the users of model of loan risk- The employees who creates loan risk models mainly have to use tools that are needed to estimate modals from range of spreadsheets which are less complex and also statistical program software that is SAS, needed for sophisticated econometric techniques.
- The gap must be filled between relationship managers who work for risk management and commercial credits- Commercial credits are deals that are frequently handled by a bank as a deal. Mortgages are credits that are considered as homogeneous (Boyle, 2014). The commercial credits are loaded with conditions and complex.
Issues to Fix
The issues that re to be fixed by Macquarie bank is that they have to attain their customers faster, and resolve their problems. The bank has to resolve all the problems that are launched by customers are to be resolved by the bank as soon as possible (Golat, 2016). The banks must introduce an advocate role of customer so that they can handle all the complaints in a better way, also improves customer service, and then minimize the future problems that are to come in the company. The advocate of customer helps to give a better service to their customers and ensures that they understand the complaints and solve them in a better way. The bank must know that where the customer is coming from and also can lodge issue to the CEO if the bank advocate is not responding to their complaints properly. The Macquarie Bank hires Nicholas Moore as a customer advocate as a post of Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director.
Criteria to Meet Requirements
There are certain criteria to meet the requirement of the proposed system. There should be proper validation and verification for the information system (Ting, 2014). The software should be validated and verified to mitigate any loopholes for meeting all the requirements in protected manner.
Need of Information System Strategy
The Macquarie Bank operates on Strategic Information environment, which enables the alignment of information strategies and business having significant focus on the effort of the company. The financial institutions are dependent on daily activity operation critically (Laudon & Laudon, 2016). The Macquarie bank is highly informative and is dependent on their information technology as their core technology. The dependence is greater for all the major banks who operate in the same competitive surrounding and also in Australia. Banks are considered as one of the first sector to implement inter-organizational information system at national level and international level. In a development of business oriented technology, banking sector is considered as one of the most important development (Peppard & Ward, 2016). The Macquarie bank in Australia gives a retail as well as wholesale service to a total of 17 million citizens who are scattered over a large area in United States. The bank has branch network and have international operations that are significant. There has been a rapid change in the banking sector in last five decades. The industry of banking and finance has moved from high level to low level in terms of regulation. The federal government of Australia has relaxed the trading bank restriction on deposit taking and also has deregulated market of foreign exchange (Pearlson, Saunders & Galletta, 2016). The Macquarie Bank has given a tough competition to all the foreign banks in the Australian market.
The main purpose of having the Strategic Information System is that there is a financial benefit so that the decision making and the productivity is improved. Strategic Information System helps to enable the management so that they can react and act on the dynamics of environment and can enable the management so that they can sustain, build, and compound competitive advantage (Gorton & Winton, 2016). The main purpose of Strategic Information System is mainly to gain competiveness which is needed to create information manipulation and also planning is done for future thinking and also for decision making. Strategic Information System is mainly needed to so that they can give a strategic plan for the recommendation so that they can address future need of the information technology in a formal and also informal way. The Strategic Information System mainly emphasize with strategic using of information (Hussin, Othman & Jamaludin, 2017). The SIS provides an evidence with the integration and facilitation of the information system in the organization. It supports the identification of all the opportunities so that the information system can be used for strategic purpose. The Strategic Information System also ensures all the adequate resources has critical applications allocated to them and also ensures the information system function by supporting the organizational activities and goals al all the levels.
Difficulties to Develop Information System Strategy
There may arise many issue at the time of implementation of Information System Strategy. All the problems that arise from the ISS can be notified at all the steps of development of ISS (Alshubaily & Altameem, 2017). The design impact planning, implementing, and designing of information system in the company. The problems that arise from implementing ISS are:
Management Challenge: Information System has to give an approach so that they can work with many different issues and also to be aware of all the aspects of information management. If the once the plan for the Information Strategy is developed, all the top management should approve the development of the system that is suggested. The senior management who are involved in the company always does not have to the ability to understand or may understand the capability of the Information System Strategic (Baskerville, Spagnoletti & Kim, 2014). All the executives should examine their responsibility so that they can implement the plan so that they can budget and time that are required to develop the ISS. Some challenges that faces the management are needed so that align of information system strategy and the business strategy are maintained. There should be an identification gap in the information system so that the organization can reach to a place where it wants to reach.
Human Challenge: The issues that are related to all the employees in a company or the organization are known as human challenge. Human obstacles are barriers in a company which implements the strategy of Information Strategy so that the obstacles are ranked. The result that comes from survey shows the resources lack so that they may be engaged in the user- education which has inability in appointing proper staff and also has the inability to employ some experts who accomplish the activities of information technology. This caused the main reasons for the failure of ISS. The obstacle that comes in the way to fulfill the user expectation is also one of the main challenge that occurs. There was also a lack of computer skill which was identified equally as a challenge and there will be major difficulty in the development of Information System (Peppard, Galliers & Thorogood, 2014). The employees of the organization also lacks in basic computer skills. The old employees show lack of interest and also are not interested to learn those skills that are highly impacted on the organization’s operation.
Technical Challenges: The technical issues that are faced by the company are issues which relate to software and hardware of the information technologies. There are also issues such as tele-communication issues in the technical challenge of Information Strategic System. Another challenge that mainly arises in development of Information system is the infrastructures and also has difficulties to mitigate or upgrade the old systems to a new system.
Environmental Challenges: The environmental challenges that can be identified in the company are the factors that are uncontrollable and may be not visible. The organizational factors involve organizational culture, behavior, poor co-ordination, change, inadequate capabilities, activities competing and also unaligned organizational resources and systems. There are also other barriers in environmental challenge which has political conflicts and mainly lacks in commitment strategy which interacts and directs the executive of the company or organization.
Information System Failures
Problems of Information Systems Projects: Information system is considered as one of the valuable aspects of the modern corporation with development of information system which faces many problems. The most important problem that arises due to information system is low productivity. There are many kinds of problems in information system projects which include failures and different alignment of Information System with the need of business. The first problem that is identified is low productivity that can also be termed as software crisis. This is indicated by the development of backlog and also the maintenance problem. There should be demands for maintaining and improving Information System which has increased faster so that they can be developed. There are particularly some reasons for the low productivity. These are increasing the cost of developing the software and also limit the supply of funding and personnel with improvements of productivity.
The second problem that arises in developing the Information System is mainly large number of failures. The failures occur due to economical mismatches which include budget and the schedule overrun. Low production also occurs due to lower quality of the product and also inadequate user satisfaction. The third reason behind the failure of Information system is the growing number of criticism in the business model (Chuang & Lin, 2017). Much of the time is spent on searching, analyzing information, refining, and recording. There is a link in between the Information System and the organizational performance. The strategies that are involved are mostly dubious. For instance, many of the users and mangers of organization or companies are facing problems where information is not available to them for running their units.
Remedies for Identified Problems: The remedies that are involved for the above stated problems are:
Failure of the System: There may be failure of the system at anytime and anywhere (Qian, Strahan & Yang, 2015). Therefore, it can be recommended that the company should maintain their systems regularly.
Maintaining the systems: The company should also have to maintain all the systems. The organization should hire some professionals so that they can maintain all the systems connected to information technology in the company.
iii) For Expenses: To maintain the expense, the company should choose system that are low cost with better quality.
Conclusions
Macquarie Group is a global business which mainly operates on over than 27 countries with expertise on all the areas that includes agriculture, commodities and resources, energy and the infrastructure with particular knowledge in the Asian-Pacific region. Macquarie has mainly differentiated by focusing the opportunities which includes geography and product. The company mainly based on three principles which includes opportunity, accountability, and integrity. The company tries to identify the opportunity and also realize them to their clients, shareholders, community, and their people. Macquarie accounts all their actions, to their clients. They compromise their standards. They mainly earn trust to their clients, community, colleagues, and the shareholders by their quality of their work.
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