IT at Work 3.5 ERM Applications Here some examples of how companies use ERM in the health-care, finance, and education sectors: The Surgery Center of Baltimore stores all medical records electronically, providing instant patient information to doctors and nurses anywhere and at any time. The system also routes charts to the billing department, which can then scan and e-mail any relevant information to insurance providers and patients. The ERM system helps maintain the required audit trail, including the provision of records when they are needed for legal purposes. How valuable has ERM been to the center? Since it was implemented, business processes have been expedited by more than 50%, the costs of these processes have been significantly reduced, and the morale of office employees in the center has improved noticeably. American Express (AMEX) uses TELEform, developed by Alchemy and Cardiff Software, to collect and process more than 1 million customer satisfaction surveys every year. The data are collected in templates that consist of more than 600 different survey forms in 12 languages and 11 countries. AMEX integrated TELEform with AMEXs legacy system, which enables it to distribute processed results to many managers. Because the survey forms are now readily accessible, AMEX has reduced the number of staff who process these forms from 17 to 1, thereby saving the company more than $500,000 a year. The University of Cincinnati provides authorized access to the personnel files of 12,000 active employees and tens of thousands of retirees. The university receives more than 75,000 queries about personnel records every year and then must search more than 3 million records to answer these queries. Using a microfilm system to find answers took days. The solution was an ERM that digitized all paper and microfilm documents, without help from the IT department, making them available via the Internet and the universitys intranet. Authorized employees access files using a browser. IT at Work Questions 1. What are the business benefits of BI? 2. What are two-related challenges that must be resolved for BI to produce meaningful insights? 3. What are the steps in a BI governance program? 4. What does it mean to drill down into data, and why is it important? 5. What four factors are contributing to increased use of BI? 6. Why is ERM a strategic issue rather than simply an IT issue? 7. Why might a company have a legal duty to retain records? Give an example.