Continuously Monitoring Bank Risk, Reputation, And Opportunity

The explosion of social and other digital media now provides virtually a continuous stream of information about organizations, their people, and their products. Although CEOs and others see the use of that social and digital information as a potential opportunity for creating value, they also recently have noted that one of the biggest risks organizations face is the potential threat to organizational and brand reputations from those same digital media. Accordingly, organizations are seeking out systems that allow them to continuously review and monitor social and other digital media in time to respond to both threats and opportunities. This paper presents a case study that investigates a system that is designed to monitor and mine the rapidly growing amounts of digital data to help banks better understand changes taking place in their worlds-regarding their products, reputations, clients, vendors, competitors, and others. Critical decisions must be made on what issues, people, and products to monitor, what digital sources to monitor, and what to do whenever some potential problem is found. The purpose of this paper is to investigate issues associated with implementing continuous monitoring systems for brand and reputation in financial organizations, with a particular focus on the "information behavior" (Feldman and March 1981) of such systems. In particular, the computer science in continuous monitoring systems seems to be ahead of actual use of such systems in organizations. As a result, although continuous monitoring systems can help companies address the mechanics of "how to do continuous monitoring," there are many open questions and implementation issues in the actual use of such systems. As a result, this paper first provides a brief background of digital disruption, some digital risks, and continuous monitoring systems. Second, the paper examines the structure and design of a system in a banking context, investigating the key system design capabilities associated with such systems. In particular, we page through different screen artifacts to gain an understanding of how the system works. Third, we examine some of the issues facing a CIO as she seeks a system to meet the bank's digital needs.