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The AIB SOX Team is tasked with determining and monitoring internal
accounts to ensure compliance with agreed business process and
SOX Audit standards implemented within the organisation. This operation
involves the review of financial data from mainframe systems, filtering
key accounts, given particular criteria and cross-referencing findings
with account information published publicly by AIB bi-annually,
at the end of the previous financial year and at the mid-point
of the current financial year.
The Challenge
Previously, to support the operations of the SOX Team, AIB employed
a complex, home-grown set of applications that required a full-time
resource to maintain. Change Management of these applications had
become unwieldy, with change requests arriving and being applied
on an ad-hoc basis throughout the year. As a result, documentation
for the system had grown significantly and the business processes
required to use the system were lengthy and time-consuming.
AIB requested System Dynamics’ assistance in devising an
efficient and effective resolution to such issues via the delivery
of a new solution - one that would provide all of the functionality
of the legacy application, but which could be maintained by the
users directly. Specifically, required improvements to the
system fell into the following areas:
- Accountability - AIB required enhanced logging
and data auditing facilities that were transparent to end users.
- Usability - Previously, bi-annual data loads
required up to three weeks of manual data manipulation and a
significant level of business oversight. AIB required that all
aspects of this activity be automated; thereby reducing the dependency
on a full-time IT resource to maintain the system, whilst empowering
business users to load and filter data via application user interface.
- Reliability - The new system was required
to adhere to industry best practices for up-time and data recovery
in the event of a hardware failure.
- Reporting – While the level of reporting
in the existing system was high, it could not facilitate the
level of year-on-year trend analysis required by the organisation.
AIB required the delivery of a new reporting suite that could
provide the necessary information in a number of formats.
The Approach
System Dynamics conducted a series of workshops with key members
of the SOX team to gain a full understanding of both the key project
requirements and the required deliverables. Resulting from these
workshops, a documentation set was produced that accurately described
the proposed solution, its required functionality, and the candidate
architecture. To assist with maintaining a shared vision of the
solution, a prototype of the application user interface was developed
and delivered to key business users as part of the analysis and
design documentation.
System Dynamics collaborated closely with AIB Information Architects
to ensure that the proposed solution aligned with AIB’s technology
stack and could be supported fully by AIB personnel going forward.
A standard documentation framework was devised to ensure compliance
with both System Dynamics’ project management methodologies
and AIB’s service delivery framework.
The Solution
Working within AIB’s architecturel and business requirements,
the solution developed consisted of three main components:
- A J2EE Websphere-based front-end - A
browser-based user interface was delivered that empowered business
users, enabling them to apply required data changes and import
data files directly without requiring IT resources to perform
the complex import functions. Resilience was applied through
a clustered server environment, ensuring that the application
would continue to function in the event of a server failure.
- A SQL Server 2005 database back-end - Using
SSIS data transformation tools, mainframe data was imported into
the system and complex business rules were applied. Auditing
was implemented at a database level ensuring that every change
applied to the data was captured and available for analysis if
desired.
- Integrated MIS - SQL Server Reporting Services
was used to securely expose required functionality as a Web Service,
enabling management reports to be integrated seamlessly with
the browser-based user interface. This enabled business users
to access reports intuitively via their browser, and export data
as PDF, XML or Excel as required.
Data from the legacy system was converted and imported into the
new solution to allow a like-with-like comparison. An extended
pilot scheme was employed to allow the SOX Team to run both systems
side-by-side for a period of time, and thereby directly compare
results from each system to ensure data integrity and secure user
confidence in the new solution.
The solution was subjected to a rigorous Quality Assurance phase,
consisting of unit, system and integration testing, user acceptance
testing and full end-to-end production testing.
System Dynamics collaborated closely with AIB’s IT Department
throughout the project lifecycle to ensure compliance with internal
technical design and security standards. The solution was used
as a test-bed for AIB’s Service Acceptance processes for
medium-sized systems and throughout. System Dynamics worked with
AIB to ensure that the transition process was implemented smoothly
without causing disruption to critical production needs.
The Benefits
- The new system allowed business-critical processing to take
place without the need for a full-time IT resource to maintain
and administer the application.
- Business processes were streamlined by the fact that end users
could obtain required data directly from the reporting component
of the solution. A highly collaborative approach in analysis
workshops ensured that all required information was made available
at the front-end.
- Improved Management reporting, especially in the area of trend
analysis, removed the dependency on time-consuming and labour-intensive
tasks associated with the previous system.
- A quality user interface ensured the solution was highly usable,
thereby reducing the overall training time for end-users. Detailed
user documentation ensured that the necessary reference material
and guidance was available when using the system.
- Resource Capacity was greatly improved by virtue of the fact
that the bi-annual import of financial data, which was a two-week
full-time task for an IT resource working alongside the business,
was reduced to a ten minute task for a single business user.
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