MS Visio

Dear Mr. D

I would just like to offer my help with any upcoming projects that might require the use of MS Visio.  I have experience using Visio and can assist with any questions your group may have in using this program.

In terms of my experience and background, in my former role as an analyst in the Risk Management department, I was part of a team that was responsible for setting certain Investment Limits and Guidelines as well as trying to automate reporting and processes around those Limits and Guidelines.  Our team worked with the IT department for automation, but it was up to us to come up with process flow diagrams to explain exactly how limits should be calculated.   These process flows could be different depending on what asset class we were working on and what type of limit we were using.  It did not seem that drawing these workflows on a napkin and providing it to the IT department was the best possible scenario.

MS Visio is a program that one of the other members of my team was familiar with and taught the group how to use.  The program is a highly effective way to graphically show the flow of information or processes or even when explaining complex calculations which need to be done using inputs from various systems.  While my stint in the Risk Management unit has passed, I've recently come across more usefulness for Visio in my current role.

The Investments Department has just announced an initiative to begin third party asset management within multiple asset classes -- one of which is the group I currently work in.  Just this past week those involved in the new initiative have been working with our Operations Department to come up with some work flows for possible third party accounts.  Both my group and our potential investment partners need to fully understand the process flow for this new business.  Who will be responsible for investment decisions?  How will data be transferred between our two companies?  Among many, many more questions. 

While most of the questions involved do not necessarily have simple and/or straight forward answers, Visio is helping us to determine what the proper process should be.  Documenting and working through each process with a visual Visio diagram can also show where there may be duplicative efforts and could lead to a more streamlined process overall.  

This new initiative, and with the aid of Visio has caused our department to think outside the group.  The investment process does not solely take place within our unit, we work with various other departments throughout the organization and while we may believe that a process is working just fine from our perspective another group a little further down the chain may have a completely different view.  For instance, I just found out that in order for one of our trades to show up on our accounting system, someone in our Back Office actually has to fax a trade ticket to the firm that is responsible for our books and records.  Yes, in this day and age, we still need to fax information as opposed to sending something electronically or, even better, having an automatic feed of some sort.  My point here is, without working through the process from start to finish and using Visio to see the actual flow of information, this would have never been brought to light.

This just gives a little background and shows some instances of where Visio has been useful for two departments within our organization and with the new third party initiative moving forward with your department as well, Visio could be very helpful.  Please feel free to let me know if I can be of assistance.

Should we be Blogging?

Dear Ms. Hirschhorn (Chief Marketing Officer)

To take the words right off of our intranet, “transforming MetLife into a customer-centric organization is a cornerstone of our strategy”.   Our customers are at the heart of everything that we do and the latest way of reaching our customers is through social media.  MetLife has a Facebook page and a Twitter account however we currently lack a blog which could be a highly effective way of reaching out to our customers.   

In order to be more in tune with our customers and the issues they may be encountering, Executive Group members have been reaching out to customers and personally walking through their issues.  If EG members are individually reaching out to customers, a blog could also be a good outlet to reach our customers.  Customers can share both positive and negative feedback about the organization, while MetLife collects the information and contacts those customers to try to help them.   

Not only for customer feedback and response, a blog could also be a good way for the Company to explain a little bit about each of our products, who may be eligible for them and what might be required in order to apply for coverage.  This may be something that we already do on our website, however in this context customers could post comments about their experience with each product as well as any questions they may have.

After doing some research, I’ve realized that each and every blog post that MetLife would create is an individual web page with our information.  That would mean that each web page is an additional opportunity for search engines like Google and/or web users to find MetLife.  According to a chart on the website http://headwaythemes.com/why-blog-beginner-blogger/ the more indexed pages on Google, the more monthly leads a Company tends to receive.  Having multiple pages on a blog that are updated on a regular basis could cause a significant increase in the amount of customer traffic we see.

Lastly, one other feature that is different about a blog compared to other social media – it is something that MetLife owns and controls.  If, for some reason, Facebook or Twitter were to be shut down tomorrow, we would lose the information that we have on those sites, including any Friend Lists, Followers and information of the sort.  With a blog, the organization would not have to rely on other sites being available or causing us downtime if they are having issues.  We also completely control the layout, content and functionality of the site itself.

Overall, I feel that a blog is yet another way to get our Company’s name out there for web users to learn about our reputation, experience and history.  It is also another way for us to be more customer-centric, reaching out and listening to our existing customers while trying to earn more customers in the process.

Google Drive vs. MS Office

A crazy thing happened on Tuesday...

My boss actually requested that I look into the possible advantages/disadvantages of using Google Drive versus MS Office and get him a report before Monday morning.

Thinking about this topic from more of a managerial perspective and not just from my lowly analyst spot, there would be several aspects of this decision that would need to be considered aside from the basic features.  A drastic change of this nature could be costly, time consuming and cause significant production issues/delays.  As of our latest reports, MetLife had 66,000 employees, but just for purposes of this discussion let’s take a look at only the Investments Department, which currently has roughly 750 investment professionals around the globe.

Since we are in the process of upgrading to MS Office 2010, let’s use that cost as a starting point. The cost of MS Office 2010 professional for Investments is roughly $262k ($349.00*750 employees).  The last time we upgraded Microsoft suite was 3 years ago, so let’s assume we can annualize the $262k over 3 years – it comes to approximately $87k/year for our department. 

Now, Google Drive may look enticing, however the free option only supplies 5GB of storage. Google Drive does have several options with different price points ranging all the way up to $800 per month (16 TB of storage). This is the missing link however in my cost investigation – in order to fully evaluate the cost-benefit analysis we would need to dig deeper into the cost of our data storage currently.  Assuming we would need 400 GB of storage per individual, this is a cost of $20/month.  That comes out to $180k per year ($20/month*750 employees =$15k/month * 12 months = $180k/year).  That is higher than the annualized cost of MS Office, however as previously mentioned I don’t currently have access to the cost of our data storage.  We would need that piece of the puzzle to completely evaluate the costs.

Another thing to think about is productivity.  I can see how hard it has been for many individuals even switching from Office 2007 to Office 2010; moving over to something completely different may be seriously detrimental.  (It’s only one instance, but I know of a person who took their laptop home after their upgrade and reinstalled Office 2007 because they could not manage trying to figure out the new upgraded software.)  I would say it took me approximately 2-3 months before I was completely comfortable with the new versions of Excel and Word (which I use most frequently).  After 3 months, I’m still not 100% up to speed with PowerPoint, but I’m definitely comfortable using it.  Switching to something like Google Drive could easily take 6-7 months for everyone to be fully functional again.

All that being said, my major concern would be integrating Google Drive with our existing data hierarchy.  I don’t know how the data warehouse, our trading system and accounting systems would interact with Google Drive whereas now everything downloads directly to Excel.  We have also begun rolling out the new Business Intelligence tools to various groups, something that has helped efficiency significantly.  We would need to test this application with Google Drive.

Lastly, security is something that we should also be cognizant of.  We would need to scrutinize our data and the security we have compared to what Google Drive would be able to provide us with.

Overall, my recommendation would be to further evaluate the amount of data we maintain and the cost of our existing data storage, if the cost is significantly more than Google Drive we should start testing Google Drive’s capabilities in integrating with our existing systems and further evaluate their security measures. 

Let the fun begin

Wow! Never imagined the day I would have a blog, let's see how this all turns out.  This should be an interesting semester!