McKinsey Banking The IT Paradox麦肯锡银行悖论.pdfVIP

47 Banking: The IT paradox Nedda Gabriela Olazabal Despite much higher IT outlays by the retail-banking industry, its labor productivity growth rates have actually dropped. What went wrong? uring the late 1990s, productivity trends in retail banking1 stood Din contrast to those in much of the rest of the economy: the industry’s information technology investments accelerated substantially, but its labor productivity growth rates, though higher than the economy-wide average, actually declined (Exhibit 1, on the next page), from 5.5 percent (1987–95) to 4.1 percent (after 1995). Research into this paradox reveals that the rela- tionship between IT and labor productivity is more complicated than merely adding the former to lift the latter. The nature of IT investments Throughout the 1990s, the focus of many retail banks on revenue growth resulted in major new IT investments, the largest involving services and mar- keting tools for customer information management and support (Exhibit 2, on the next spread). Financial institutions have traditionally been organized around product lines, such as deposit accounts, loans, and credit cards. Coordination among departments was loose, and customer information did not flow easily across the organization. To remedy this problem, banks attempted to create a single customer inter- face, which forced them to integrate their databases and IT systems. Once this was accomplished, banks adopted applications—or, more precisely, customer-relationship-management tools—to improve their customer reten- tion and to facilitate up-selling and cross-selling. All of this required signifi- cant investments in personal computers for branch employees and call-center 1 This industry was studied as part of the McKinsey Global Institute’s inquiry into the sources of accel- erating productivity rates in the United State