A soft knowledge modeling approach for geographically dispersed financial organizations

Fund management is a major function for most financial sector enterprises with geographically dispersed activities. The risk associated to such managerial decisions affects directly the continuity, profitability and reputation of the enterprise. This paper presents a knowledge modeling methodology tool to act as a decision support mechanism for geographically dispersed financial enterprises. The underlying research addresses the problem of financial information capture and representation by utilizing the soft computing characteristics of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs). By using FCMs, the proposed mechanism generates a hierarchical and dynamic network of interconnected financial knowledge concepts, simulates the operational efficiency of distributed organizational models with imprecise relationships and quantifies the impact of geographically dispersed activities to the overall business performance. Generic adaptive maps offer an alternative approach to financial management based on strategic level knowledge modeling and integrate hierarchical FCMs into the decision making model of typical financial sector enterprises. Finally, this paper discusses experiments with the proposed mechanism and comments on its usability.