INTELLIGENT
FINANCE
Intelligent Finance (IF), the offset banking division
of the Halifax, has upgraded to the latest version of
Computer Associates' AllFusion Harvest Change Manager
software.
AllFusion Harvest Change Manager is a repository-based
system that handles change control across IF's in-house
application development projects. The system is able
to co-ordinate changes across disparate Microsoft, Sun
and IBM platforms.
Mike Gannon, head of applications, IF, says: "We
have literally thousands of software components running
across disparate hardware platforms and without AllFusion,
the management of change would be, if not impossible,
then heavily manual and laden with risk."
The software is expected to generate ROI within one
year and minimise the risk and downtime associated with
application development. CA says the system's quality
processes will significantly reduce product time-to-market
and ensure final applications meet the needs of the
business.
The latest release of the product - version 5.1.1 -
was implemented over a three-month period by CA supplier
Trinem to replace AllFusion Harvest Change Manager 4,
which IF had been using since 2000.
Source: www.finextra.com
BANK OF EAST ASIA (BEA)
Bank of East Asia is the largest independent bank in
Hong Kong. Since 1918, BEA has put corporate governance
on center stage while expanding its diverse business
and personal banking. services.
“CA’s Enterprise CCM solution puts us in
the driving seat for application development, providing
us with better quality control and improving corporate
governance.” said Jonathan Siu, Technical Support
Manager of The Bank of East Asia.
BEA owes its success to its extensive use of IT. Over
the years, the bank has built an extensive IT environment
managed by a dedicated team of IT professionals to deploy
core banking applications to meet rising customer demands.
However, after years of deploying new applications and
upgrading old ones, BEA ended up with a highly complex
enterprise application development environment spanning
multiple operating systems—each with its own set
of procedures.
“The problems that we faced were nothing new,”
said Jonathan Siu, Technical Support Manager of the
Bank of East Asia. “However, as development environments
increased in complexity, we wanted better management
capabilities and efficient automation of labor-intensive
manual procedures.”
Taking a proactive approach, the bank searched for an
enterprise-caliber change and configuration management
(CCM) solution to rein in complexity and streamline
software development procedures across its multiple
operating systems. BEA found that CCM solutions from
Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) met all
of its needs.
From the onset, BEA reaped immediate benefits. The integrated
enterprise CCM solution automated and streamlined software
development processes. It ensured greater efficiency
with fewer errors while saving valuable time. Since
the CCM solution spanned both mainframe and open systems,
it provided BEA a snapshot of the entire enterprise
software development environment, giving the bank the
opportunity to standardize processes across all its
platforms. In addition, the highly scalable enterprise
CCM solution allows BEA’s project teams to employ
it while working on both large and small distributed
systems.
By using AllFusion Harvest Change Manager, BEA has centralized
control of software development to better manage and
disperse applications. This, in turn, raised productivity
levels and continuously promotes quality software products
by helping ensure that all system components are built
as a complete unit. Built with the dynamic nature of
the banking environment in mind, the CCM solution gives
BEA unparalleled flexibility to meet new demands with
breakthrough improvements in quality and time-to-market.
Most importantly, the enterprise CCM solution gives
the audit department absolute control over application
development and a detailed view of the processes involved.
Now, personnel can efficiently search for any information,
from any point in the development life cycle, and govern
software development effectively.
Source: www.ca.com
Framingham Development Center
The Computer Associates International (CA) Framingham
Development Center is one lab location where the efforts
of developers worldwide come together to create and
improve CA software solutions. In order to simplify
the management of development projects among heterogeneous
environments and improve productivity, the Development
Center needed a Software Configuration Management (SCM)
solution that would scale across the Development Center.
AllFusion Harvest Change Manager (AllFusion Harvest
CM) was the best tool to address all the lab’s
SCM needs. AllFusion Harvest CM, a software change and
configuration management solution, helps organizations
effectively manage complex, enterprise-wide development
activities throughout the entire application development
life cycle.
Prior to implementing AllFusion Harvest CM, the Development
Center used several platform-specific point solutions
to manage development in separate homogeneous environments.
However, the code base the developers were attempting
to manage was frequently multi-platform. They would
have to perform additional steps, such as “FTP’ing”
(File Transfer Protocol) code across these platforms
and onto the platform where the point solution management
product resided.
Many CA developers reside in different countries throughout
the world, yet they are part of project teams whose
code needs to be aggregated centrally. Therefore the
ability to support remote clients was a major consideration.
Three distinct groups within the Development Center
pressed for a better solution. The UNIX group utilized
utilities such as RCS (Revision Control System) and
SCCS (Source Code Control System) and wanted to find
a more comprehensive toolset. The PC-based developers
were using simple check-in/check-out utilities, which
lacked the structure and organization of a life cycle
management tool. One development team was using multiple
configuration management products for each of their
development platforms. They needed to implement a solution
that crossed platforms and provided complete process
control.
AllFusion Harvest CM provided all teams in the lab with
a flexible SCM environment for multiple independent
development groups working on diverse projects. AllFusion
Harvest CM allowed them to centrally manage project
life cycles, parallel development efforts, problem tracking
and related events for all of their development projects.
Some of the point solutions offered pieces of this functionality,
but none delivered a heterogeneous solution in one easy-to-use
package.
AllFusion Harvest CM enforces processes and ensures
life cycle management throughout maintenance and development
activities, which allows the developers to concentrate
on their programming tasks.
By standardizing on AllFusion Harvest CM across the
Framingham Development Center, it also creates shared
expertise, which can reduce training and implementation
costs for future projects. As
more developers become familiar with the solution, that
knowledge base helps shape the direction
of AllFusion Harvest CM.
“By eliminating multiple disparate solutions,
our return on investment was immediate,” said
Abt., Framingham’s project leader, “And,
we expect to see greater ROI as we roll out this solution
to other Development Centers.”
Several specific features of AllFusion Harvest CM have
proved invaluable to the Framingham group. “The
ability to create ‘User-Defined Processes’
gives us great flexibility in supporting many peripheral
developer activities such as coordinating and augmenting
the build process,” said Abt.
Source: www.ca.com
Yarra Valley Water
Yarra Valley Water is the largest retail water company
in the Australian state of Victoria, servicing more
than 1.5 million people in Melbourne’s northern
and eastern suburbs.
In October 2000, Yarra Valley Water recognized the need
to have an effective application change control solution
to manage changes required of its billing system. AllFusion
Harvest Change Manager solution was chosen as it could
meet the Yarra Valley Water’s immediate objective
of controlling change to existing application code,
as well as being scalable and adaptable to cater to
future systems development.
Yarra Valley Water has a team of six developers. Before
implementing AllFusion Harvest Change
Manager, they did not use any specific change management
tools, relying instead on a series of audit trails,
spreadsheets and emails to track individual development
tasks.
This provided the IT team with little control over its
internal systems and made it difficult for the developers
to manage the daily process of code management. As they
did not use a version control tool, concurrent code
development between different members of the team often
occurred, resulting in coordination difficulties and
exposure to regression of coding changes.
“Without a rigorous approach to our code management
processes, our developers were often operating independently
instead of as a team. This approach impacted on our
ability to deliver services in a cost-effective manner,”
said Simon Soon, CIO at Yarra Valley Water.
CA implemented AllFusion Harvest Change Manager as the
foundation for Yarra Valley Water’s integrated
systems. Yarra Valley Water now uses the comprehensive,
repository-based features of AllFusion Harvest Change
Manager to track and maintain its complex, enterprise-wide
development activities, which include its billing system,
asset management and workflow management.
The implementation took just over three months with
one full-time Yarra Valley Water team member and two
members of CA’s technical staff working on the
project. CA also offered training and technical support.
Since implementing AllFusion Harvest Change Manager,
Yarra Valley Water has been able to keep
its application and software changes under control,
development schedules on track and all developers up-to-date
on specific projects. The six developers have met demanding
delivery schedules in an efficient and timely fashion
and, at the same time.
ss WITH CA
Source: www.ca.com
FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION
Operational Support Directorate (AOS) is part of the
Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA). Its mission is to provide engineering
development services and support to FAA National Airspace
System (NAS). AOS provides all software, hardware and
technical documentation for the NAS communication systems,
surveillance systems, navigation systems and basic infrastructure
to keep it operating safely, reliably and efficiently.
AOS headquarters, located in Washington, DC, has many
divisions located around the nation. There’s nothing
trivial about what the 1,600 people in AOS do. If NAS
goes down, public safety is at risk. Whether they’re
involved in an emergency repair or simply upgrading
outdated equipment, 8,000 regional NAS field technicians
have absolutely no room for error. Up-to-Date and Accurate
Documentation is Critical to the Mission.
Just a few years ago, AOS managed a 79-step process
documentation life cycle entirely by hand. When a request
for a document change came in from a field technician,
it would trigger a flurry of activity. With its geographically
dispersed locations and high volume of employee travel,
the challenge for documentation service personnel was
keeping track of where a document was at any point in
the 50-step document life cycle. They attached tracking
sheets to the documents, but it was time-consuming to
tell who had the documents at any given time and what
condition the documents were in. They could have 60
documents in different stages of the document life cycle
in any given month. If a document was hung up in a review,
no one knew necessarily where it was.
The manual process was cumbersome and required a complete
rework if a document was lost along the approval route.
Mistakes were expensive to correct, with increased costs
of doing business and the cost of inaccurate inventory
information. That’s when the AOS decided it needed
an electronic document flow and change management tool.
Since automating the process, the FAA has felt an immediate
return on investment. Now, when a document goes through
the life cycle, whether it’s a single change or
a brand new document, the process originates in and
is managed entirely by AllFusion Harvest CM.
It used to take weeks to get a change through the process.
With AllFusion Harvest CM, it’s taking anywhere
from a few days to hours. Field technicians receive
technical documentation orders of magnitude faster.
From an efficiency standpoint, the AOS-200 Technical
Publishing and Information Systems Groups now support
two additional divisions and another FAA Directorate.
The groups have increased technical publication support
from 65 to 85% of all AOS electronic publications since
implementing this new methodology. This enables AOS
to support its overall mission of keeping the NAS running
smoothly.
An additional benefit is the email notification generated
by the custom, user-defined processes as documentation
packages are promoted and/or demoted from state to state
in the flow. Messages are automatically generated only
to analysts concerned with a particular documentation
package in a particular state. After progressing through
the entire flow, completed and approved documents are
placed on the FAA intranet for internal use.
Source: www.ca.com
DesertDocuments
Services (DesertDocs)
DesertDocuments Services, located in Tempe, AZ, is the
leading provider of Internet document solutions for
the mortgage industry. It provides the software to manage
and complete the templates lenders use to prepare closing
documents for borrowers. DesertDocs’ solution
is web-based, so lenders combine information from loan
applications and their DesertDocs software via an XML
interface or by data entry to populate closing documents.
DesertDocs maintains a substantial forms library consisting
of more than 5,000 templates. The templates DesertDocs
supplies must comply with state and federal requirements,
as well as mandates from government-sponsored enterprises,
the Federal Housing Authority and the Department of
Veterans Affairs. Whether it’s the institution
that ultimately supplies the mortgage or the institution
that draws the mortgage, there are regulations to follow.
And where there are regulations, there are inevitable
changes to those regulations that DesertDocs must track.
Whenever a change request is raised concerning a particular
DesertDocs form, it can trigger hundreds of related
changes because every loan program and every customer
could have that form—or a piece of it— in
their document sets. Tracking changes to forms is the
number one challenge for DesertDocs’ IT team.
“We must be able to track and manage a single
change request through multiple change channels to ensure
we get a compliant document in the end,” said
Jamie Glass, EVP of Sales and Marketing for DesertDocs.
“We also need to make sure we don’t break
something in the process.”
The company used to use a variety of tools to track
document changes, most of which were built internally.
DesertDocs didn’t have a controlled process that
could log every change request by a customer and associate
them with a particular funds vendor.
What was needed was a sophisticated, yet easy-to use
software solution to manage the change process. The
company found it in AllFusion™ Harvest Change
Manager (AllFusion Harvest CM).
“Before, getting a change in motion could take
anywhere from days to weeks. With AllFusion
Harvest CM, we’ve streamlined it to the point
where we can get a change in process and working within
minutes,” said Glass.
The primary gain for DesertDocs since implementing AllFusion
Harvest CM has been an increase in
customer satisfaction. A secondary gain as well as a
competitive advantage has been DesertDoc’s ability
to use AllFusion Harvest CM as a sales tool.
Source: www.ca.com
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