They are designed to be readily accessible to business users and focus on industry issues in areas such as Customer Insight, Multi-Channel Transformation, Core Systems, and Risk & Compliance.
The IFW business models will assist a bank in implementing a flexible, reusable, extensible, and easily customizable architecture, which in turn will enable the bank to: In its conception, the IFW was an enterprise architecture framework created as an alternative to the Zachman Framework.
[4] The IBM Industry Models are used primarily for the development of internal company standards, and provide an overall integration layer across an organization's existing and future IT investments.
With their strong business and IT orientation, IBM Industry Models are designed to be customized to reflect the precise needs of every company using them.
Hence, every company will have its own customized industry-specific version of IBM's data, process and service models, allowing them to represent areas that are unique to their business and constitute competitive advantage.
IBM's approach is to facilitate or embody the most important industry standards, which are most often data models or messaging formats.
The third challenge is addressing the requirements of efficiency, growth and resiliency to provide more relevant, robust, timely, and cost-effective information to business decision makers.
Mergers and acquisitions, the introduction of channel architecture, the development of technologies such as internet banking and telephone banking, the introduction of product bundling and the shift in focus from transactional systems to customer-facing systems, such as operational single view of customer, have all brought about extensive changes in the way financial services organizations operate.