Managing
Return on Investment in Operations
- Details Category: Practice Management
One of the discussions I am in this time of year as budgets are finalized is - how much can I really get back from a particular technology investment in the coming year. Operations is an area ripe with return on investment (ROI) as there are a wide array of soft and hard costs.
Hard costs, those fixed and variable expenses that are black and white on the ledger, are the most attractive when identifying ROI. These are paper, mailing and overnight, vendor costs, fees and other payables that are clearly measurable. Soft costs on the other hand, are not always popular as they are based on creating
Year End Operations Housekeeping
- Details Category: Practice Management
For many practices, things quiet down a little between Thanksgiving and New Years. This is an ideal time for you and your operations team to run through a checklist of year end tasks.
These tasks revolve around business continuity and recovery, security (both in office and on the road) and general review of your practice systems.
Staying in Sync
- Details Category: Practice Management
One of the more challenging issues with all of our emerging technology is staying in sync. If you are walking around with a Blackberry or iPhone, have a laptop for travel and perhaps a desktop PC in your home office - how do you keep them all up to date?
There are numerous ways to tackle this, and unfortunately, no single definitive answer. However, there is hope as we will review a couple of approaches with the technology tools often discussed on this site (and include Mac users as well!).
Memo to Ops Teams - get Savvy about SAS70
- Details Category: Practice Management
Bill Winterberg made an excellent comment on my last article about information security - regarding outsourcing our applications to third-party web-based providers. This is coined "cloud computing" - i.e. our data and software is utilized and accessed via the web browser.
As Operations frequently deals with the most delicate information about your customers and may be managing some of the most complex processes in the practice - choosing your service providers is a critical process. You are handing off the data and connecting to them remotely with an assumed trust factor that your activ
Operations Teams and Information Security
- Details Category: Practice Management
I recently had a discussion with a peer in the industry who works as a compliance director at an independent broker dealer. We were analyzing a recent SEC administrative proceeding that sends somewhat of a chilling message to technology managers at independent firms.
The SEC settlement at note fell under the Reg-SP rule of safeguarding customer information. In this case it was an independent broker dealer and RIA with a large universe of independent affiliated representatives. In short - it found the firm liable for having not mandated and enforcing (my emphasis) appropriate security on every
