Find the latest press releases for companies operating in the U.S. home finance industry at MortgageSpeak.com. When you're seeking competitive intelligence, Greg Janecka and his team make it easy. MortgageSpeak.com.

Effective IT Hiring

If you are the guy who hires IT developers for your company, how do you make sure they know what they can do for you before you put them on the payroll? Should you be switching platforms, and if so, how do you choose a new one that makes sense? What about SLAs? App development? Which mobile devices should you be focusing on? Adam Riglian has written a handbook to help you choose IT candidates with the skills needed to meet your objectives.

Understanding SaaS

What is the down side of a SaaS-based vendor making automatic updates to its system’s features? If you are a mortgage lender using or about to a pick a SaaS-based loan origination system, there are some issues and loose ends you may not have addressed. Lawrence Garvey’s InformationWeek article “SaaS Still Not Simple-As-A-Service” offers valuable points to consider about cost, data ownership, security and more.

Vendor offers free class

ReverseVision, Inc., San Diego, is offering a free online class focused on changes announced by HUD in recent Mortgagee Letters 2014-07 and 2014-12 through its ReverseVision University (RVU). Find out more about the class at http://ReverseVision.com/RVU.

Tip: Guarantee Transparency

By Scott Kersnar I just received an email from GoDaddy, warning me that a website I share will be down for maintenance most of a particular night in a few days. As it turns out, the inconvenience will be minor, but had I needed to have it up ASAP, I would have been emailing or on the phone looking for frequent updates and getting ready to seethe at any unanticipated consequences. Advance warnings are great, but when Murphy’s Law kicks in, it's even better to have access to a status page that will give you real-time status updates. It’s harder to start throwing things at the wall when the emergency you are suffering is being handled in a transparent way. For users of enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS), having that kind of transparency is crucial, since you don’t have hands-on tools to get your operations back up and running yourself. On his blog, Israel SaaS Center founder Dani Shomron offers a guide to SaaS Incident Management Best Practices that should be required reading. In addition to advising that any incident management plan take as a given the fact that things break, Shamron outlines a monitoring, mapping and response plan and talks about status pages like the Salesforce Trust site and a new service, StatusPage.io, that can defuse pointless blow-ups between providers and users until things are up and running again.

June 6, 2014

Are you running a "customer-centric" business? Most of us like to think we are. If you're working in a mortgage bank, the CFPB would certainly like to think you are running a customer-centric business. Check out this blog post with a very interesting infographic that will help you see how close you are to the goal.

June 2, 2014

If you’re just waiting to buy a smartwatch until personal wearable information systems have indeed matured as everybody’s next big thing, PC Magazine is touting a Forbes report that tells us Microsoft is closing in on launching a multi-sensor device that will sync with iOS, Android, and Windows Phones. Though Microsoft has made no comment at this point, it has applied for a patent for a device for a personal wearable “information system” that can measure fitness activities, has a GPS and compass to keep you from getting lost and will have a communications interface that can hook you up with your tablet, your Facebook page, your office, your doctor, your boss, your parole officer, the NSA… Are you sure you want one of these?