Reverse-Engineered Bank Processing

Reverse-Engineered Bank Processing

This project was a study in non-deterministic complexity. The problem for this bank, was that within their North American Operation the EOD (End-of-Day) processing was beginning to take more than the available time (8-12 hours) to complete on a nightly basis, and due to the lack of a sound architecture, the complexity of the interaction between product applications, and in large part, the lack of cross-product development coordination, it had become imposible to fix.

The situation was componded by an ongoing territorial conflict between the European headquarters and the New York office, that was capitalizing on the issue to advocate a “Europeanization” of the technology effort in New York, as well as the reluctance of the Operations staff, which was highly segregated from Product Development, to allow their direct involvement in remediation of the problem, out of concerns of disrupting the integrity of the production environment.

Working with the Chief Systems Officer, in New York, and a VP of Development, the innovative solution I devised was to embed “tracking” directives in the existing scripting command files, and evaluate the necessary dependencies based on the collected data. The resultant solution was known as the “EOD Monitoring Systems” – or “EMS”, and was written in “C” so that it was portable on both Unix and OpenVMS Operating Systems, and therefore, quickly deployed.

We accomplished “buy-in” by soliciting input on all fronts on a weekly report. It had the intended effect of having everyone “cleanup their own house” which resulted in some immediate benefit. Further gains were to come later, as my VP associate was a master at making the raw data we collected “talk” through its visual presentation in Excel.

From the collected data, the bank was able to devise a solution. I side-stepped the political conflicts, and merely armed the constituents with the basic facts, essentially fast-tracking a solution within a bureaucratic, and politically volatile environment.

The end result is that the problem was solved quickly, (and faces were saved).

Download the Project Documents