chart of the month
IT investments can play a critical role in raising business productivity. But a study of 100 manufacturing companies in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States found that
IT investments have little impact unless they are accompanied by first-rate management practices, which, by contrast, can boost productivity on their own. We rated companies on how well they used three important management practices: lean manufacturing, which cuts waste in the production
process; performance management, which sets
clear goals and
rewards employees who reach them; and talent management, which attracts and develops high-caliber people. The companies that had the highest marks in these areas became more productive, with or without higher spending on IT. Those that combined good management practices with IT investments did best of all.
IBM targets core replacement
01 July 2005
IBM has committed $140 million of investment to its new Core Systems Transformation in order to help banks renovate their back office systems and gain market advantage in the emerging on-demand world. CST is a portfolio of transaction processing platforms and services from IBM, which allows banks to migrate their back office systems to internet architectures in a phased manner.
The main components of the CST solution are: business transformation methodology to identify hot spots ripe for optimisation; transaction processing infrastructure to deliver core banking functions as flexible web services; and support for market leading core banking applications by working with best-of-breed providers, such as Fidelity Information Services.
Michael Liebow, vice president of web services, IBM Global Services, said: "The culmination of $140 million of investment and this partnership with Fidelity will enable us to create the underlying service oriented architecture for the financial services industry. It leverages our prior investment in the integrated financial warehouse data model cost that they can standardise on and allows us to create the ecosystems in banking for platforms to be open and flexible in the marketplace. That flexibility creates cost savings and new revenue generators."
IBM and Fidelity Information Services are now delivering the first implementation of CST, a version of Fidelity's Corebank product that has been rearchitected as a fully compliant Java application exploiting CST infrastructure including IBM zSeries, pSeries and TotalStorage. This new Java version is available currenttly in Japan under the unwieldy title "Next Evolution in Financial Services Systems" (NEFSS), and has been delivered to the first client, Suruga Bank.
NEFFS builds on the functionality of Fidelity's existing Corebank product. Corebank provides true real-time, component-based core-processing capabilities within a relational database environment based on IBM's Information FrameWork data models and is tightly integrated with IBM's software/hardware stack.
Who can use EGL?
Developers who need to solve business problems, not technology problems, are those who will benefit most from EGL technology.. --> I would like to have a POT on this.
Target customer are
- those who need higher productivity
- those who need to deploy to diverse platforms
- biz oriented 'developers'
- 4GL developers, VB developers, db developers, RPG developers, COBOL/PLI developers, VAG developer, Informix developer
The context which EGL fit into Rational portfolio of products . see above diagram.
EGL generation
Enterprise Generation Language gives you the ability to develop and test your application independently from the execution environment. As a developer you do not need to be concerned with the specifics of the target environment.
First, you develop your application using the easy-to-learn EGL ( this is like 4GL) high level language. The testing and debugging process begins early in application development, with breakpoint and variable testing capability available in the workstation-based development environment. Then, when you want to put the EGL application you have built into production, you can generate source code for one of several target environments. You then compile the source for the runtime target environment, adn test and debug on the remote target system.
The generation capability EGL creates source code which can be deployed to any of the several
different run times.
- Cobol for z/OS (batch or CICS)
- Cobol for iSeries
- Java to run either in a J2EE managed application or as a non-J2EE standalone Java app.(in windows, Linux, AIX or zOS USS)
The business case for Project Portfolio management
Prior to the merger with Hewlett-Packard, Compaq decide to analyze/manage every IT project - over 1000, in a Primavera project management solution.
Knowing that the CIO would be able to view every project, sponsors quickly identified and removed non-strategic projects. At the end of the review process, 39 projects were immediately canceled - saving the organization US$15 million.
Fidelity National Financial Inc.,
one of the world's largest providers of IT solutions to the mortgage and financial services industries, has chosen IBM technology as the platform for a new system for processing nearly half of the United States' 55 million home mortgages, IBM says.
Fidelity National Financial, through its Fidelity Information Services subsidiary, is the market leader in mortgage processing, IBM points out. It provides mortgage servicing technology for approximately 24 million existing loans, with a total balance of $3 trillion, on behalf of financial institutions that include seven of the top 10 U.S. mortgage lenders. Fidelity's loan servicing system handles myriad accounting tasks for mortgage payments and investor funds, facilitates customer interactions and resolves non-performing accounts.
As part of a multi-million-dollar agreement, Fidelity has chosen IBM's WebSphere Internet infrastructure software, or "middleware," as the backbone of a new, Web-based system designed to speed up mortgage processing and create more seamless communication between Fidelity's network and those of its client financial institutions, IBM says.
Fidelity also is purchasing IBM's DB2 database software and IBM Rational development tools, and it is replacing existing mainframe computers with three new IBM eServer z990 "T-Rex" mainframes. The recenty installed mainframes already have resulted in significant growth in the number of loans processed per minute, IBM notes.
"As historically low interest rates fuel the U.S. housing market, banks and other mortgage lenders seek increased automation and efficiency in the mortgage servicing process so they can meet increased demand while containing costs and enhancing customer service", said Hugh Harris, President of the Mortgage Division of Fidelity Information Services. Harris further stated, "As part of its plans to rearchitect its servicing platform, Fidelity is relying on a new Web-based system to reduce paperwork and other manual processes and, because the system is based on Java and other open standards supported by IBM, to more easily exchange information with its clients' disparate IT systems."
"In processing 24 million mortgage loans, our system must handle 1 billion individual computer transactions every month," said Joe Nackashi, Chief Technology Officer, Fidelity Information Services. "Not only must we do this with the utmost reliability, but we need to be responsive to a mortgage industry that is rightly demanding more speed, efficiency and productivity. We've chosen IBM as our primary technology partner because they have the right level of industry-specific expertise and technical innovation that we need."
IBM and Fidelity have been jointly designing the new processing system at sites including IBM's Washington Systems Center in Gaithersburg, MD, and IBM's High Volume Web Site center, which is based at IBM's Silicon Valley Lab and works closely with more than 150 customers who operate some of the world's largest Web sites, IBM adds.
"We're delighted to be Fidelity's closest partner as it breaks new technological ground to better serve its customers," said Mark Bishof, Vice President, Worldwide Industry Solution Sales, IBM. "We're committed to Fidelity because we see them as an important company that can benefit from IBM's industry-specific expertise and our e-business on demand approach, which helps companies use IT resources more efficiently and quickly respond to changing customer requirements and market conditions."
As part of this agreement, explains IBM, Fidelity will be using WebSphere Application Server for z/OS; WebSphere Portal Server for ZLinux; WebSphere Business Integration software including MQ Workflow for z/OS, Message Broker, and Modeler and Monitor products; DB2 database software; and Rational development tools.
The new system will support both Fidelity's customers that receive the company's services on demand under an Application Service Provider model, as well as its traditional license customers.
