Posted by Mark Brousseau
Bottomline Enhances Global Cash Management Platform
Today at the AFP Annual Conference in San Francisco, Bottomline Technologies announced new functionality for its WebSeries Global Cash Management platform, enabling banks to leverage industry standard messages for faster, more efficient cash reporting.
Through these new cash reporting capabilities, banks can send account statements and advices to corporate clients and correspondent banks. As the demand for real-time reporting among corporates and financial institutions continues to increase, WebSeries’ new functionality, which includes Nostro reporting, allows bank admin users to quickly and easily configure clients to receive statements and advices as needs and business requirements evolve.
“By leveraging industry standard messages, banks can quickly overcome many of the difficulties associated with efficient cash reporting. These new reporting capabilities are another example of Bottomline’s continuing commitment to helping banking customers support the needs of corporate clients through innovative features and functionality,” said Eric Campbell, Chief Technology Officer of Bottomline Technologies.
Showing posts with label reporting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reporting. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Business Intelligence at SSA
By Mark Brousseau
Business intelligence has transformed the way the Social Security Administration (SSA) does business, John Simermeyer, associate commissioner, Office of Earnings, Enumeration and Administrative Services, for the SSA said yesterday during a presentation at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2009 in Washington, D.C.
“Our business intelligence efforts are an integral component of the agency’s planning process,” Simermeyer told attendees. “Business intelligence empowers SSA to accomplish our mission.”
Each year, SSA issues more than 18 million Social Security cards, posts $4 trillion in earnings to worker records, processes over 23 million status-changes, pays out more than $650 billion, and fulfills more than 1 billion requests for Social Security Number verification from other agencies and organizations).
The challenge for SSA is that its workload is increasing as its staff is decreasing. “The retirement rate has hit SSA very hard,” Simermeyer explained. “Retiring baby boomers are driving up the workload at SSA. At the same time, we are losing many of our knowledge workers to the same phenomenon.”
SSA also was challenged by information silos across the organization. “We have many legacy systems dispersed throughout the agency,” Simermeyer said. “This creates problems in terms of cost and data reconciliation. We spent a lot of unnecessary effort trying to find out why numbers don’t match.”
To help with its mission, SSA deployed its SSA Unified Measurement System (SUMS) to provide critical information across its workflows and systems. “It’s all about the data, and that was perhaps our greatest challenge,” Simermeyer said, recalling SSA’s inflexible reports and lack of infrastructure across the organization. “So, we created a business intelligence repository and focused on data integration.”
Business intelligence helps “inform SSA’s strategic decisions affecting American taxpayers,” he said.
“We are using business intelligence to transform data to information to knowledge to action, and it’s having a positive impact on our business outcomes,” he said. “We’ve improved decision-making and transparency, and drastically reduced the amount of data reconciliation efforts we go through.” He noted that with business intelligence, SSA has gone from multiple sources of data to a single source.
Simermeyer said that business intelligence also, “improved the timeliness, accuracy and measurement of work. Prior to business intelligence adoption, we were reactive by nature. Now we are proactive.”
So what’s next for SSA’s business intelligence initiatives? Simermeyer said the agency plans to integrate its remaining work into the system to retire legacy systems and enhance its information infrastructure.
Business intelligence has transformed the way the Social Security Administration (SSA) does business, John Simermeyer, associate commissioner, Office of Earnings, Enumeration and Administrative Services, for the SSA said yesterday during a presentation at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2009 in Washington, D.C.
“Our business intelligence efforts are an integral component of the agency’s planning process,” Simermeyer told attendees. “Business intelligence empowers SSA to accomplish our mission.”
Each year, SSA issues more than 18 million Social Security cards, posts $4 trillion in earnings to worker records, processes over 23 million status-changes, pays out more than $650 billion, and fulfills more than 1 billion requests for Social Security Number verification from other agencies and organizations).
The challenge for SSA is that its workload is increasing as its staff is decreasing. “The retirement rate has hit SSA very hard,” Simermeyer explained. “Retiring baby boomers are driving up the workload at SSA. At the same time, we are losing many of our knowledge workers to the same phenomenon.”
SSA also was challenged by information silos across the organization. “We have many legacy systems dispersed throughout the agency,” Simermeyer said. “This creates problems in terms of cost and data reconciliation. We spent a lot of unnecessary effort trying to find out why numbers don’t match.”
To help with its mission, SSA deployed its SSA Unified Measurement System (SUMS) to provide critical information across its workflows and systems. “It’s all about the data, and that was perhaps our greatest challenge,” Simermeyer said, recalling SSA’s inflexible reports and lack of infrastructure across the organization. “So, we created a business intelligence repository and focused on data integration.”
Business intelligence helps “inform SSA’s strategic decisions affecting American taxpayers,” he said.
“We are using business intelligence to transform data to information to knowledge to action, and it’s having a positive impact on our business outcomes,” he said. “We’ve improved decision-making and transparency, and drastically reduced the amount of data reconciliation efforts we go through.” He noted that with business intelligence, SSA has gone from multiple sources of data to a single source.
Simermeyer said that business intelligence also, “improved the timeliness, accuracy and measurement of work. Prior to business intelligence adoption, we were reactive by nature. Now we are proactive.”
So what’s next for SSA’s business intelligence initiatives? Simermeyer said the agency plans to integrate its remaining work into the system to retire legacy systems and enhance its information infrastructure.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
School Data System Flunking Out
Posted by Mark Brousseau
An interesting article from The New York Times:
Crucial Data on Graduates Is Elusive
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
The Class of 2008 has already tossed aside caps and gowns for swimsuits and tank tops. The Class of 2009 has begun dreaming of proms, diplomas and exit strategies. But the public has yet to learn what percentage of New York State’s Class of 2007 actually graduated from high school.
Blame the state’s new data system, which is expected to cost $39.4 million over six years. Tom Dunn, a spokesman for the state’s Education Department, acknowledged that the system had been “not completely successful” in uploading and processing information from New York’s 695 school districts. He said the move to a single data repository had “caused a number of problems.”
“Those problems are being corrected now,” Mr. Dunn said, adding that the state was in the process of verifying numbers with school districts and expected to release 2007 graduation rates by the end of the month. (Rates for 2008, he said, would be released in February.)
Of all the statistics that increasingly figure into public debate about schools, graduation rates are widely considered among the most crucial indicators of whether a system is working. They are watched with particular urgency in New York City, where the low but slowly climbing graduation rate was a contentious topic during the 2005 re-election campaign of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
For years, the city and state have used different criteria to calculate the graduation rate, and the discrepancy has caused tension among city and state officials and confusion among parents. In 2006, the state said that 50 percent of the city’s seniors had graduated, while the city said 59 percent.
(The state announced 2006 graduation rates in April 2007 — just as the Class of 2007 was suffering late-stage senioritis.)
The new data system was supposed to resolve those differences, with officials in Albany and New York City agreeing to release a single number. Or, as it has turned out, to not release it for a long time.
“Asking the public to be patient here is simply not an answer,” said Merryl H. Tisch, a member of the State Board of Regents, who described the delay as “frustrating and intolerable.”
“I think the public should frankly demand more timely testing results and more timely graduation data,” she said, “because, after all, they’re being asked to invest an enormous amount of money in the system.”
Ms. Tisch said she faulted the state’s Education Department, some local school districts that failed to properly report their data, and McGraw-Hill, whose Grow Network subsidiary is responsible for part of the new data system and is expected to receive $13.3 million over six years for that work.
Kelley Carpenter, a McGraw-Hill spokeswoman, said in a statement that the Grow Network was primarily responsible for the “reporting part of this system” but was “not involved in data entry and collection.”
“We will continue to work with the state to generate reports as data is made available,” she said.
David Cantor, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Education, said the city had given the state the required information in a timely fashion. “Obviously, we’d have liked the numbers sooner,” he said of the graduation rates, adding, “It’s very tough to run a data system of this size smoothly the first time.”
New York, which began creating the new data system several years ago, is among a number of states that have invested millions recently to computerize school information, to meet the requirements of the No Child Left Behind law and, more broadly, as part of an increased focus on educational accountability.
New York’s new system assigns every student in the state an identification number so they can be tracked throughout their educational careers, even if they switch schools or districts. The system keeps track of test scores and attendance as well as graduation numbers.
Mr. Dunn, the State Education Department spokesman, said that the problems leading to the late release of the graduation rates were not specific to McGraw-Hill’s Grow Network, but that the company had “a share” of responsibility.
“There’s just an enormous amount of new information that’s moving through here at all areas,” Mr. Dunn said. “The new volume has created challenges, from people having to fill out different forms to different verifications and all of the multiple steps involved.”
In an e-mail message to school superintendents this month, Jean C. Stevens, an associate state education commissioner, pointed a finger at school districts, saying that while calculating graduation rates, the state had identified many districts with possible data-reporting problems.
“Many districts may have misreported graduates,” she wrote. “In some cases no graduates were reported.”
Betsy Gotbaum, the New York City public advocate, noted that the city Department of Education’s own $80 million data system, developed by I.B.M. and called ARIS, has been criticized by principals and teachers as cumbersome and difficult to use, even as parents have questioned its hefty price tag.
“We have already seen with ARIS here in the city how expensive and flashy computer systems are turning out to be clunky and flawed,” Ms. Gotbaum said in a statement. “The longer we have to wait for these data systems to produce results, the more skeptical people become.”
Mr. Cantor said the city was improving ARIS. “While it did not come out of the box perfect,” he said, “we got an awful lot of information to a large number of people.”
Jane Hirschmann, the founder and a co-chairwoman of Time Out From Testing, an antitesting group, said the information delay was “just typical” of how the city and state education departments “are spending our taxpayer money with absolutely no results.”
“It would be much better to put money in the classroom and keep track of what’s really important,” Ms. Hirschmann said. “This is the administration of testing and data collection. As far as parents are concerned, we don’t buy it. We don’t think our children are better because of it.”
An interesting article from The New York Times:
Crucial Data on Graduates Is Elusive
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
The Class of 2008 has already tossed aside caps and gowns for swimsuits and tank tops. The Class of 2009 has begun dreaming of proms, diplomas and exit strategies. But the public has yet to learn what percentage of New York State’s Class of 2007 actually graduated from high school.
Blame the state’s new data system, which is expected to cost $39.4 million over six years. Tom Dunn, a spokesman for the state’s Education Department, acknowledged that the system had been “not completely successful” in uploading and processing information from New York’s 695 school districts. He said the move to a single data repository had “caused a number of problems.”
“Those problems are being corrected now,” Mr. Dunn said, adding that the state was in the process of verifying numbers with school districts and expected to release 2007 graduation rates by the end of the month. (Rates for 2008, he said, would be released in February.)
Of all the statistics that increasingly figure into public debate about schools, graduation rates are widely considered among the most crucial indicators of whether a system is working. They are watched with particular urgency in New York City, where the low but slowly climbing graduation rate was a contentious topic during the 2005 re-election campaign of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
For years, the city and state have used different criteria to calculate the graduation rate, and the discrepancy has caused tension among city and state officials and confusion among parents. In 2006, the state said that 50 percent of the city’s seniors had graduated, while the city said 59 percent.
(The state announced 2006 graduation rates in April 2007 — just as the Class of 2007 was suffering late-stage senioritis.)
The new data system was supposed to resolve those differences, with officials in Albany and New York City agreeing to release a single number. Or, as it has turned out, to not release it for a long time.
“Asking the public to be patient here is simply not an answer,” said Merryl H. Tisch, a member of the State Board of Regents, who described the delay as “frustrating and intolerable.”
“I think the public should frankly demand more timely testing results and more timely graduation data,” she said, “because, after all, they’re being asked to invest an enormous amount of money in the system.”
Ms. Tisch said she faulted the state’s Education Department, some local school districts that failed to properly report their data, and McGraw-Hill, whose Grow Network subsidiary is responsible for part of the new data system and is expected to receive $13.3 million over six years for that work.
Kelley Carpenter, a McGraw-Hill spokeswoman, said in a statement that the Grow Network was primarily responsible for the “reporting part of this system” but was “not involved in data entry and collection.”
“We will continue to work with the state to generate reports as data is made available,” she said.
David Cantor, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Education, said the city had given the state the required information in a timely fashion. “Obviously, we’d have liked the numbers sooner,” he said of the graduation rates, adding, “It’s very tough to run a data system of this size smoothly the first time.”
New York, which began creating the new data system several years ago, is among a number of states that have invested millions recently to computerize school information, to meet the requirements of the No Child Left Behind law and, more broadly, as part of an increased focus on educational accountability.
New York’s new system assigns every student in the state an identification number so they can be tracked throughout their educational careers, even if they switch schools or districts. The system keeps track of test scores and attendance as well as graduation numbers.
Mr. Dunn, the State Education Department spokesman, said that the problems leading to the late release of the graduation rates were not specific to McGraw-Hill’s Grow Network, but that the company had “a share” of responsibility.
“There’s just an enormous amount of new information that’s moving through here at all areas,” Mr. Dunn said. “The new volume has created challenges, from people having to fill out different forms to different verifications and all of the multiple steps involved.”
In an e-mail message to school superintendents this month, Jean C. Stevens, an associate state education commissioner, pointed a finger at school districts, saying that while calculating graduation rates, the state had identified many districts with possible data-reporting problems.
“Many districts may have misreported graduates,” she wrote. “In some cases no graduates were reported.”
Betsy Gotbaum, the New York City public advocate, noted that the city Department of Education’s own $80 million data system, developed by I.B.M. and called ARIS, has been criticized by principals and teachers as cumbersome and difficult to use, even as parents have questioned its hefty price tag.
“We have already seen with ARIS here in the city how expensive and flashy computer systems are turning out to be clunky and flawed,” Ms. Gotbaum said in a statement. “The longer we have to wait for these data systems to produce results, the more skeptical people become.”
Mr. Cantor said the city was improving ARIS. “While it did not come out of the box perfect,” he said, “we got an awful lot of information to a large number of people.”
Jane Hirschmann, the founder and a co-chairwoman of Time Out From Testing, an antitesting group, said the information delay was “just typical” of how the city and state education departments “are spending our taxpayer money with absolutely no results.”
“It would be much better to put money in the classroom and keep track of what’s really important,” Ms. Hirschmann said. “This is the administration of testing and data collection. As far as parents are concerned, we don’t buy it. We don’t think our children are better because of it.”
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