Question

Case Study 3.2: A Large Retail Bank: Reducing the Complexity of Changing an Address

(Gold-Bernstein, Beth, and William Ruh. Enterprise integration: the essential guide to integration solutions. Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., 2004. Page 42)

Situation

Throughout the 1990s, the strategy of the leading retail banks was to grow through acquisition. Many regional banks disappeared during this time, swallowed up into larger institutions. During this process, many of these banks ended up with a diversity of information systems. It is not uncommon even today to find 30, 40, or even 50 systems that contain customer information. Checking, savings, personal loans, auto loans, mortgages, credit cards, and every other product provided by the bank would have a separate information system. During acquisitions there would be several systems supporting each product. As a result, getting a single view of a customer was not possible. Furthermore, just changing an address could be a long and dreary process to any bank who maintained several business relationships with a client. Checking and savings information might be changed, but mortgages would require a different process for changing address. This is a perplexing experience to banking customers. Why should something as simple as a change of address require a complex set of actions on their part to get it right? Customer service representatives for the bank could only forward the customer to the next department for service. In one case, a large bank in the southeast had over 30 systems where customers' address information might be contained. When a client had more than two products he or she would be forced to deal with different parts of the bank to get his or her address correct. Inside of the IT organization, each system would have thousands of lines of code (LOC) to manage and update a change of address. This would include the user interface for input, the verification and validation of the information, and the actual update to the database. The update was the smallest portion of the code and usually less than a hundred lines. In this organization there were over 150,000 lines of code associated with changing an address across well over 30 systems—none of it integrated and all of it maintained. Not only were customers not happy, but the cost of the code involved was high. This situation exists in many forms in most large organizations.

Solution

Through a strategy of improving customer service including change of address, a single service was developed to manage the update to all systems with less than 15,000 LOC, and it provided improved customer support.

Impact

The business integration strategy led to higher customer satisfaction, reduced complexity and cost of maintenance, and made future integration easier. An application such as this can be a big win for any organization and it demonstrates the value of the business integration strategy.

Task

Read the above case and answer the following:

1. Identify key problems and describe their impact on business productivity and customer satisfaction.

2. Explain Integration and identify how it would help this situation.

3. The solution indicates that “a single service was developed”. What type of integration would this be?

Answer 1

1) The key problem in this situation was the unmanaged "aquisition" of business by the large multinationals, without looking into the management issues that might arise. For ex: one of the main issues that came up was that of "address" the multinationals only thought of acquiring the business, but could not understand the effect that it would have. This mismanagement led to lower productivity and customers gradually become unsatisfied. The major draw back was the extensive paper work that was required to just settle down a change of address.

2) Integration does not hamper much of the administration and management as it is done through mutual consent. In integration expansion takes place which enables aby company to serve the customers better with the new endowed technology and possibilities. It helps them to cater to their customer base with moe ease.

3) The integration applicable here is the Conglomerate Integration.