Financial Planning Essay

|Topic: â€Å"Describe the essential element to be a successful financial planner in Hong Kong and China. Explain the challenges of | |practicing ethical financial planning in Hong Kong and China. † | The financial climate is changing constantly with the changing of numerous influential factors. Financial planning is one of the financial industries which gradually developed from a vague concept to a recognized specialty.However, this industry is still in a young stage so that there are some problematic issues concerned especially in some Asian districts like Hong Kong and China. It can be reflected particularly in the remuneration system and professionalization of financial planners as well as public recognition for this industry. To reach a mature level, the first step is establishing a public confidence. Therefore it is emergent for financial planners to think about how to become successful. As the role of helping clients makes some most important decisions of their lives, f inancial planners are required to satisfy a specific set of essential elements.The first and also the most basic requirement for them is strong professional knowledge. Financial planners should be able to implement a comprehensive process when help clients create financial plans and evaluate financial products packages independently to satisfy clients’ need. Well-rounded professional knowledge in varied fields is crucial at the moment which including not only the financial related areas such as economics, business management, and investment, insurance but also some other non-financial related areas such as psychology and sociology.Having the general base knowledge is the start but not the end in the career so that many financial planners are expected to have an expertise in particular field which can help them directly take an advantage position in satisfying some specific clients’ need. Take the insurance planning as an example; a financial planner who is expertise in the insurance industry as well as having the basic all round knowledge will be most likely to gain the clients’ trust.In addition, the ongoing learning is also essential since the financial environment is changing every day and all the decisions should be made according to the particular background environment. The Mainstay’s survey in 2006 shows that 85 percent of the population wants financial planners who are knowledgeable, skilled, and actually care beyond the transaction. And there are also other researches and evidences indicate that interpersonal skills are more important than technical expertise at most times.In this sense, the ability to have emotional resonance with clients and show one’s sincere and caring attitude would be crucial to attract new clients and establish a long term relationship with existing clients. Also it is applicable in making financial plans and implementing related strategies because clients’ assistances and cooperation p lay a significant role in the process. This implication can be obviously reflected in the second step of a formal personal financial planning process, gathering client data and determining goals.When communicating with clients, an excellent financial planner would be able to extract useful information to understand the client’s motivation as well as manage their expectations. It is no doubt that a good reputation is the most valuable thing for financial planners. In addition to professional knowledge and strong interpersonal skills, ethical behavior is a great concern. Proposed ethical behavior standards are based on principle of integrity, objectivity, competence, fairness, confidentiality, professionalism and diligence.These principles given by CFP Board aim to encourage public confidence to financial planning industry as well as explicitly identify practitioners’ responsibilities and obligations to different stakeholders. However, practicing these ethical principles in real world may not an easy task. The following part of the essay will examine the challenges of practicing ethical financial planning in Hong Kong and China. With rapid wealth accumulation and increasing investor demand in Hong Kong and China, a higher potential development opportunity for financial planning services had been witnessed.But at the same time, a higher expectation for quality financial planning with insufficient confidence from the pubic becomes a source of challenges for this industry. It appears to be tougher when considering the implementation of ethical financial planning since the nature of the industry is based on trust between clients and planners. These challenges are reflected particularly in the following aspects. Firstly, fee-based financial planning barely exists in Asia due to the low consumer acceptance degree, which most likely to lead to an issue of interest conflicts.A financial planner is commonly compensated by commissions from selling product qu otas given by their companies and the selection of product may not be the best choice for clients. It also matters when considering the risk tolerance for financial planners’ income. Only commission-based compensation may result in unethical behavior practiced by financial planners to survive because of sharp drop in income during the business recession. Secondly, it is challengeable for financial planners to offer high quality services without sufficient confidence and trust from clients.Financial planners must have deep understanding about their client’s financial status, needs and concerns in order to give desirable advices. However, most Chinese consumers are not willing to offer their private information to people whom they are not familiar with, which make it difficult to decide the initial plan and identify the expected outcomes. It is true that an excellent financial planner should have the interpersonal skills of encouraging clients to provide related informat ion as much as possible.The contention about what degree an planner should pursue discovery conversations and how to justify the ethical position when making effort to gain the consumer information is concerned. Finally, the level of knowledge and education of financial services to the public are relatively low in districts for some undeveloped cities in mainland China, which may become a kind of misguided incentive of unethical behavior to financial planning services providers affected by the poor review mechanism and lapses of checks.It can be strongly reflected in the fairness issue such as disclose of information between planners and clients It will take long for this industry to develop mutually, some improvement measures can be practiced now. Efforts could be focused on several aspects including the closely supervise of cooperate governance, adequate training for practitioners’ competence and professionalism, as well as the education for the public.

Omega Inc. Bia

BACKGROUND Omega Research is a rapidly growing research and consulting firm. They have a single main office located in Reston, VA and three small branch offices located in San Diego, CA, Salem, OR, and Kansas City, MO. Omega is not currently involved in e-commerce or business-tobusiness relationships. Two weeks ago, Omega experienced a significant loss of proprietary data (estimated value $550,000. 00) that was stored electronically in an Oracle database in their main office in Reston. The data was unrecoverable and backups were not being routinely maintained, so no restoration was possible. Although he has no hard evidence, Omega’s CTO believes that the loss resulted from deliberate deletion of files by a systems administrator from the Kansas City office that had been â€Å"let go† several weeks prior to the loss. Needless to say, the CTO has been tasked to â€Å"get things under control. † You have been hired as a consultant to develop a comprehensive plan for improving the company’s recovery posture in order to prevent future outage of Omega’s critical systems and network resources. Your guidance and observations will eventually be used to develop a long-term procedural and policy solution for Omega Research. The CTO has stepped up to the plate and made the commitment to do whatever it takes to address these issues. Baseline Network Infrastructure * Omega leverages AT&T Managed Internet Services for each of its office locations. * Omega owns and manages the border routers for each of their office sites. * Offices in Reston, San Diego, and Kansas City receive full T-1 service. * Offices in Salem receive 256k F-T1 circuit service. Systems Business processes provided by AIX Environment 1. Financial 2. Reporting 3. Data Warehouse LAN Vendor| Services| Address| Phone| Contacts| IBM| Tape LibraryTSM Server| 522 South RdPoughkeepsie, NY 12601| 214 451-7747| Steve Barretta| SunGard| Recovery services for server environment| 401 N Broad St. Philadelphia, PA| 877 456-3966215 351-1300| * Don Meltin (Test Coord. ) * Jack Fabrianni (Acct. Rep) * Lincoln Balducci (Resource Coord. )| BASELINE ARCHITECTURE Local Area Architecture (Reston Office) AIX Environment * Perimeter protection provided by screening router. Configured for dynamic packet filtering using reflexive Access Control Lists (ACL’s). Remote access is provided to employees while at home or on travel through PPTP VPN, and, dial-up RAS offered by a Microsoft Windows NT 4. 0 Server  ®. * All servers in the Reston office have been centrally located to a data center. * The Reston data center supports a 5-keypunch combination lock that is required to have access to the room. That combination is shared with all IT personnel and is infrequently rotated. * The d ata center is controlled for humidity through HVAC purification. * The data center is controlled for temperature with isolated HVAC services. The data center is not on a raised floor to control static electricity. * The data center does not have a site-wide UPS. Each server and network equipment supports their own mini-UPS. * Internal Omega E-mail is supported by a Microsoft Exchange  ® 2000 mail server running on a Microsoft Windows  ® 2000 Server. Omega has installed an SMTP mail gateway to support Internet mail exchange. * Omega is the registered owner of omegaresearch. com and maintains a DNS Server at the Reston facility for name resolution supporting Omega users and to allow Internet access to publicly accessible information (web and e-mail). Web hosting services are provided on a Microsoft Windows  ® 2000 Server running Internet Information Services (IIS). * X. 500 directory services are available through Active Directory although their implementation is relatively imma ture – they are operating in a mixed environment. * Server and client o/s environments have not been routinely patched. * Reston office printers are all network connected. * The IT Department is responsible for management of the networks and networked resources at the Reston facility. They manage more than 170 workstations and 6 servers performing the functions previously described. Client machines consist of Microsoft Windows  ® 95, 98, NT Workstation 4. 0, 2000, and XP. Mac operating systems include OS/8 and OS-X, Panther. * Productivity applications have not been standardized. Some user communities enjoy Corel OfficeSuite  ® while others appreciate Microsoft Office  ®. There are various editions of these packages installed on client machines. BASELINE ARCHITECTURE Local Area Architecture (San Diego Office) * The San Diego is essentially a mirror of the network architecture provided at the Reston facility. * Differences: o San Diego does not host a web server. San Die go does not support VPN or RAS connections. o There are fewer employees working out of the west coast office. The local IT staff consists of one engineer who manages all networks and networked resources within the San Diego office. o There are less than 50 client machines in San Diego with similar configurations as the main office. o All servers have been located in a spare office in San Diego. * There is not a controlled access restriction like in the main center. * The office is not controlled for temperature, humidity, or static. * There are no redundant power supplies. BASELINE ARCHITECTURE Local Area Architecture (Salem Office) * Salem is a small site with only 30 workstations configured in much the same way as the rest of the company. * Sale supports a single combined shared file and print server hosted on a Microsoft Windows  ® NT 4. 0 Server. * Mail services are obtained through the San Diego office, using mailboxes set up on the San Diego Exchange Server. * There are no publicly available networked resources at the Salem office. * Remote access to Salem’s infrastructure is provided to mobile and home employees using VPN client to gateway connectivity. Salem has an IT staff of one engineer that manages all networks and networked resources at this site. * All servers have been located in a spare office in San Diego. * There is not a controlled access restriction like in the main center. * The office is not controlled for temperature, humidity, or static. * There are no redundant power supplies. BASELINE ARCHITECTUREARCH Local Area Archi tecture (Kansas City Office) * Kansas City is very similar in size to the Salem office with the exception that Kansas City runs a Microsoft Exchange  ® 2000 server for mail services. Kansas City has a local system administrator for support. * All servers have been located in a spare office in Kansas City. * There is not a controlled access restriction like in the main center. * The office is not controlled for temperature, humidity, or static. * There are no redundant power supplies. Figure [ 1 ] – Main Application Equipment List CONSIDERATIONS Networking and Systems Administration 1. Access to any site LAN automatically guarantees access to the entire WAN. This means that user accounts authenticated in the Salem office have immediate access to resources in San Diego, Kansas City, and Renton. . User accounts and access restrictions are independently managed by each office’s system engineer. There is not a common user policy – rules concerning how passwords are created an enforced, cycled, aged, lockout, user account retention, and so on, are created and maintained per office. 3. There is no formal backup and disaster recovery policy at any site. Backups are decentralized. Off-site rotation only happens at the Reston office. Salem currently performs DASD to DASD backups without Tape copies being made. 4. The local system administrators at the satellite offices take all direction from the central office and are not authorized to make boundary router changes. They do not have authority to change anything without central IT approval. They have no site specific budget; they have full accountability for their LAN’s. 5. All machines run antivirus software although local IT staff infrequently maintains their definition files and relies on user intervention to perform file updates. No machine has spyware protection. 6. There is no dedicated program for training employees on avoiding threats like, say, Phishing. . Firewall logs, host packet analysis, application logs, event and error logs are generally ignored across the board. Business Requirements 1. The organization is growing rapidly in spite of recent events. 2. Their strength is in developing business within the local market and providing on-site consulting services. The research end of the business is the well-spring from which they draw their competitive edge, but Omega is realizing that consolidating the research workforce adds synergy to their efforts, and reduces unnecessary overhead. 3. They plan to continue down that road. As a result, local sites will expand their consulting workforce and research will continue to be consolidated at the Reston and San Diego facilities. As this trend continues to develop, access to the research data stored at the east and west coast facilities becomes critical. Additionally, they cannot afford a similar loss of proprietary information as was recently experienced†¦. and they know it could have been much worse. Known Environmental Risks 1. The San Diego office is located in a 20-year earthquake zone. Once every 20 years, it estimated that a 6. -Richter scale earthquake or greater will strike the facility, likely causing damage to the facility/computer equipment; management assumes losses to computer assets could be estimated at 20%. As a countermeasure, the company has purchased insurance with $18,000. 00/year annual premiums that increase 5% every year. 2. The Reston office is located in a 500-year flood zone. Once every 500 years, it is estimated that a flood will strike the facility likely causing damage to the facility/computer equipment; management assumes losses to computer assets could be estimated at 40%. The company has opted to not purchase insurance. Annual premiums would run approximately $25,000. 3. The Kansas City office suffers a significant tornado event once every five years. When the tornado hits, severe electrical disruption affects the equipment and the office suffers 10% losses on computer assets. The company pays $14,000 in annual insurance premiums. Appendix A. Balance Sheet Reston| | Book Value| Actual Value| | | 81,290 45,690 27,390 13,330| 17,250 9,450 4,309 0| Networking Equipment Server EquipmentWorkstation Equipment Peripherals| | | | | TOTAL:| 167,700| 31,009| Kansas City| | | | Networking Equipment| | 12,700| 11,900| Server Equipment| | 4,009,250| 3,400,000| Workstation Equipment| | 18,200| 13,400| Peripherals| | 4,433| 0| | TOTAL:| 4,044,583| 3,425,300| Salem| | | | Networking Equipment| | 4,300| 0| Server Equipment| | 3,600| 0| Workstation Equipment| | 7,200| 500| Peripherals| | 4,433| 0| | TOTAL:| 19,533| 500| San Diego| | | | Networking Equipment| | 81,290| 17,250| Server Equipment| | 45,690| 9,450| Workstation Equipment| | 27,390| 4,309| Peripherals| | 13,330| 0| | TOTAL:| 167,700| 31,009| Appendix B. The Business Impact Interviews Bill Hermann – We are a service-based company and our ability to take in and book cash is critical. Without solid cash flow or expenses increase exponentially in the very short period of time. In addition our cash position which I monitor through the SAP system allows us to manage our treasury and short-term funding. I would estimate within two days we would have to borrow money which could increase our costs and overhead. Tiffany Sabers – The I. T. organization is in a period of transition when it comes recoverability. Implementation of SAP was very expensive, time-consuming, and drawn out. We have built-in a level of redundancy to sustain production should any number of things fail within a data center itself. However we are not in as good a shape as we should be to protect your organization to the entire data center become unavailable for any significant period of time. Several factors come into play when considering the recovery of a central system such as SAP. The availability of the technology we've chosen at our recovery vendor has been a challenge to say the least. SunGard needs to acquire and fund the appropriate IBM servers that we use to run the SAP application. Secondly there is for a terabytes of production data that needs to be recovered from tape once a disaster is declared. The recovery activity using the current tape library technology on the floor is estimated to take 3 to 4 days barring any problems. For tape to be a viable option going forward we need to upgrade to higher speed higher density devices and media to meet the needs of the business which is another capital expense. I think we all knew and accepted the risk of having to retool with the implementation of SAP. Now that time has come and this exercise is crucial to determine the proper recovery strategy and technology to meet the business needs. John Sampolous – I agree with Bill that our finance structure is key. Since we don't make anything physical our business model relies on our cash position. I will say though without having finance information available we may begin borrowing on the second day of an outage. The way the SAP system works without current data we will be a day behind at the time of business start the second day. We're certainly capable of maintaining business function but will begin to lose $3-$500,000 per day in interest alone. The bottom line is treasury function that is maintained via a finance module within SAP is critical from our standpoint. Linda Okonieski – from a purely operation standpoint we are currently dead in the water if we can't get to our schedules and billing information for the persons in the field. We generate a quarter million dollars in revenue a daily basis to our service organization. So if there is a hard fail of the SAP system we stand to have issues in two functional areas. The first and most obvious is that if we cannot invoice our clients in a timely manner or cash flow will diminish significantly at the end of the first week. The second concern is his longer-term and related to legal and contractual ramifications if we could not maintain business as usual as quickly as possible. In our business customer confidence and brand value are priceless and need to be protected. So if we are unable to quickly recover we could very well lose future business that could affect our viability of the company. Nate Brown – Linda hit the nail on the head, we need to ensure that we have the right people in the field generating income through billable hours and we need to continue to collect for their work. So I would say the schedule and billing within the SAP system ranks very high for me. And to add to Windows last point customer confidence is how we've been able to maintain a preferred vendor status with most of these companies where we do business, so many chink in the armor could cost us a significant amount of business. Sandy Ales – Without access to the SAP system we can’t sell services we can’t deliver. Most of our customers rely on us to be able to find and supply the appropriate consultant/resources as quickly as possible. Since we are one of several preferred service providers we will begin to miss out on new contracts and renewals to our competition. Our reliance on up to date information affects 30 to 40% of our short-term contracts and their ability to compete or longer-term assignments for our higher value personnel. Since we converted from our old system last year we had become completely reliant on the SAP application. Tyler Amdahl – We have built-in on site redundancy for the SAP system, but we are still negotiating a new contract with SunGard services for a recovery configuration at the hotsite. Given the amount of data that is involved with the SAP system we are looking at 12 to 16 hours minimum recovery. Rachid Chad – The SAP system is designed/architected for failover capability. Unfortunately the production system implementation is currently around $14 million dollars. There is no economy of scale for full redundancy or real-time failover. There are several options worth considering if anyone the recovery time objectives that we all agree to. I can say that they will not be cheap so we will need to understand the costs were relating to an outage from the business perspective to enable us to construct the proper recovery strategy. Reyes Emme – If you were to ask the employees they would rank getting their paychecks on time as a number one priority. However the fact is that by self insuring our payroll funding for a week to 10 day period we could provide estimated payroll and then rectify many issues once we're back up and running. We in HR also have or long-term concerns should an outage extends for more than a few days and began to affect our brand value. The reason to be quite honest is that we attract the best consultants partly based on their perception of our technical abilities as an organization. Fionna O'Connor – The audit and compliance areas are not affected in the short term should an outage occur. However, timing is everything. Should the outage occur during the close of SOX testing on the ramp above financial reporting to the board we could have issues with the regulators will. Jackson Davis – We have an all-in situation with the SAP system. We are completely reliant on the system availability for day-to-day operation. The risk we have with the prolonged outage is that we will begin to incur penalties for our accounts payable since we have been able to migrate to a just-in-time payment practice. I am also concerned that we may not have the proper documentation to manually operate should the system be unavailable. I think however this exercise turns out several of our departments need to go back and designed some contingency plans should the data center be unavailable to us. The penalties for late payment would be 10% of $100,000 per day.

Social Science Analysis

Social Science AnalysisEducational Technology represents an interesting extension of Education as a societal scientific discipline. Though instruction is anchored in decennaries of scientific survey and analysis, educational engineering is in its babyhood as a societal scientific discipline. As Sayer ( 1992 ) reminds us, societal scientific disciplines are hard to analyze due to the big figure of variables and the troubles in insulating variables when experimentation is attempted on a societal group or in a societal scene ( p.3 ) . To this terminal, one must see whether educational engineering qualifies to be recognized a ‘science ‘ at all. In general footings, ‘science ‘ is defined as ‘the systematic survey of the universe around us ‘ . The American Physical Society ( 1999 ) further delineates scientific discipline as an entity that â€Å"extends and enriches our lives, expands our imaginativeness and liberates us from the bonds of ignorance and superstition† through experimentation/testing of Torahs and theories. In scientific discipline, cognition is gathered, organized, and condensed so that it may be farther tested to turn out or confute the work of others. Science involves the attachment to structured rules of survey ( scientific method ) , communicating between scientists, reproduction of experiments, and the credence of information that disproves before recognized theories or decisions based on new observations or decisions. Scientists must be willing to openly and candidly supply methods, processs, and informations to maintain scientific survey ethical, dependable, and believable. Based upon the definition and rules of scientific discipline, the field of educational engineering meets some but non all standards of scientific discipline. While educational research ( in general ) seeks to quantify the consequences of new attacks, course of studies, or even bing methods, there is trouble in retroflexing research due to the societal nature of the acquisition environment. Often, consequences vary from schoolroom to classroom or twenty-four hours to twenty-four hours as can be observed on pupil appraisals. Educational Technology is, hence, excessively ‘new ‘ to be evaluated as a scientific discipline since research workers are still in the ‘information assemblage and analysis ‘ phase. Though the scientific discipline of acquisition and the art of learning have been studied extensively, the job with educational engineering is that it is viewed more as a tool to learn other topics than as its ain separate field of survey. For this ground, much of the research conducted has focused on the effectivity of a bringing medium for larning instead than instructional schemes that use engineering in instruction ( Reeves, Herrington, and Oliver, 2005 ) . Clark & A ; Mayer ( 2007 ) postulate that it is the instructional scheme instead than the bringing medium that determines larning results ( p.21 ) . Hence, until educational engineering embraces the ‘method ‘ instead than the ‘medium ‘ of engineering integrating, it will stay on the peripheries of scientific discipline and scientific survey. In order create a deeper credence of educational engineering among data-driven decision makers, educational engineering will necessitate to supply a greater sense of dependability through proving that can be replicated in any schoolroom. It is imperative that educational engineering be studied from the instructor ‘s position if it is to be efficaciously relied upon in schools and schoolrooms. Researching educational engineering for its offering of new media, appliances, and devices is the equivalent of purchasing a auto without trial drive it. Some educational engineerings may work better than others in certain scenes or with certain particular conditions but be wholly uneffective if non decently applied or instituted by the teacher. Web 2.0 tools and their societal deductions in instruction will non be trusted by pedagogues and decision makers until research is able to supply assurance that educational benefits exist through following these tools in the instructional procedure in a systematic mode that will bring forth an expected result as a consequence of applied instructional schemes and methodological analysiss. As a research worker, I will seek to make full the nothingness by utilizing the available research and informations to bring forth methodological analysiss for work outing jobs instead than merely supplying more informations that is merely focused on educational engineering tools.MentionsAmerican Physical Society ( 1992 ) . Ethics & A ; Values / Education: 99.6 â€Å" What is scientific discipline? â€Å" Retrieved from hypertext transfer protocol: //www.aps.org/policy/statements/99_6.cfm on 12-20-09. Clark, R. C. and Mayer, R. ( 2007 ) . E-learning and the scientific discipline of direction: proved guidelines for consumers. Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons. Reeves, T.C. , Herrington, J. , and Oliver, R. ( 2005 ) . Design Research: A Socially Responsible Approach to Instructional Technology Research in Higher Education. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 16 ( 2 ) , 96-115. Sayer, A. ( 1992 ) . Method in societal scientific discipline. New York: Routledge.

POL 200 Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

POL 200 - Assignment Example he American democratic system is backed by several features such as freedom of press, freedom of speech, transparency of government through media coverage, and open hearings and town hall meetings. However, in the practical implementation, there is a lack of political participation which can be judged through three ways; voting, lobbying, and review. Voting participation in elections is one of the main features of a participatory democracy and in America; only about half of the people exercise their duty of voting. Secondly, lobbying means participating in the decision making of the government, sharing ideas, and views etc. But there are professional lobbyists working in this regard and special interest groups that influence the individual agendas. Thirdly, electoral review is the accountability of the representatives to their constituencies but most of the representatives are ignorant to these preferences and the population is ill equipped to exercise their duty of review. Kim Irish-Bramble wrote the detailed structure and reality of the American democracy which included the theory and practical implications. The article was concluded with the actual democratic system in America which is still wanting. There have been certain attempts made to export democracy in order to improve the political problems but this isn’t the way. The best way to sort out the current political problems is to participate under the features of the democracy and carry out the democratic system efficiently and honestly. In democracies, often there have been conflicts between the national securities of the people with their individual rights. Many groups have started fearing that such measures are eroding the democratic society. One example of such conflict is wartime measures. At the time of war, there are several restrictions that need to be imposed on the civil liberties which are considered to be infringing the individual rights. There are restrictions on freedom of speech, freedom