I’m travelling next week to visit an overseas Trust Company.  I’ll be reviewing their requirements for a new core system to manage their business and its processes.  In conducting this review I will be looking to see how they want their business to develop in the future and using the ICE mnemonic to help me. So what is ICE?

I = Informed

• How well informed are your staff?
• Is the information they need presented to them at the right time, or do they have to trawl through reports and files to find things?
• Are tasks allocated, prioritised and easily visible when they login to their preferred system?
• Do you manage by exception?

C = Compliant

• How well are you able to comply with local and international regulations?
• Is compliance a by-product of doing business or does it require additional effort to collate the information and report to your relevant regulatory body?

E = Efficient

• Do you use your system to drive your business processes?
• Do you have to rekey information into multiple systems?
• Do staff often have to wait for others to complete a task before they can get on with their work?

From time to time it is worth stepping back and asking yourself these questions to assess how well you are doing against these simple criteria.

I’ll let you know how I got on in a couple of weeks and provide some specific examples how you may be able to get your business ICE cool!