The bank laid off 350 people when its updated its back office processes.
The Department for International Development said it is ready to share services with other overseas departments in an effort to streamline back office processes.
To protect or even improve frontline services, while cutting costs, we need to move to a model that empowers people, measures what they do, and is based on a new type of technology, that automates many routine, back office processes and that reflects quickly how people and organisations actually work.
"Improving your back office processes - is one of the best things businesses can do to improve productivity," he says.
While agency owners and sales personnel have long valued the benefits of automation -- less paper to shuffle, reduced costs of handling business -- digitalization in the insurance business has largely been a back-office process.
Neelie Kroes, the EU's competition commissioner, evidently agrees: she said last week that banking would be among the first targets of a unit she is setting up in Brussels to bash cartels.What may be holding Europe back as much as anything is the lack of a centralised retail payments mechanism an unglamorous back-office process that is the backbone of any financial system.
Moreover, unlike past studies, no front-office process has a corresponding back-office process in our sample.
But teleworking firms are offering to reduce the cost of back-office processes that are indispensable.
These back-office processes are arcane, unglamorous and too often taken for granted until things go wrong, when their importance becomes painfully apparent.
Sector leader Sir Stephen Bubb is heading Charity Futures, a two-year inquiry into charity governance and leadership focusing particularly on back-office processes and costs.
Nandan Nilekani, boss of Infosys, which has a $150m-a-year R&D business, points out how much this area differs from the outsourcing of IT and other back-office processes.
