Case Study

Amentra Leads Financial Institution Through Governance and Process Management Initiative

Service:
Business Process Management
Industry:
Finance
Engagement
Full Lifecycle Project Implementation
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Integrated legacy systems, instilled best practices and built in Six Sigma process improvement

Before Amentra

A leading financial institution handles millions of financial transactions a day, and not only must these transactions be stored, but also analyzed for trends and future business opportunities. In such an environment, maintaining adequate controls around the analytical environment becomes a mission critical business function.

Historically, the business needs had always taken precedence over the necessity for strict IT controls. This introduced numerous challenges as the corporation matured and governmental policies such as Sarbanes-Oxley worked their way down into the organizational landscape.

Perhaps nowhere was the lack of strict IT controls more evident than in the transition from Oracle to NCR's Teradata. The financial institution chose Teradata from NCR to house the corporate analytical datamarts; however, the company remained in a transitional state of migration from Oracle. Even though Teradata represented a distinct move away from an Oracle control set, the controls were simply being inherited, and proved to be largely inadequate for the new Teradata enterprise data warehouse system.

After Amentra

  • Identified key business processes
  • Introduced governance and organizational structure
  • Organized IT infrastructure in line with industry best practice (ITIL)
  • Instrumented processes with disciplined approach for improvement (Six Sigma)
  • Developed centralized enterprise application for control and reporting
  • Legacy enterprise systems unified through integrations (EAI)

Evolution of the business process

Amentra helped the financial institution overcome the following critical business challenges:

Governance and Controls
The same entrepreneurial spirit that drives young companies will often create an organization that focuses on the opening win rather than long term operational controls or governance. Amentra created a universal system of governance that became a model for the IT organization. The ownership and assignment of responsibilities coupled with formal process definition, paved the way to a controlled, repeatable environment.
Process Management
The organizational complexity of the financial institution created a challenge when attempting to implement process control. Processes were often informal, and company reorganizations orphaned many formal processes by not redefining responsibilities or ownership. Amentra defined and published a service directory of processes on the company intranet which clearly defined roles and responsibilities within each state. End users benefited as they gained visibility into their current stage in the process. In addition, processes were instrumented to report back delays and process times at each state, enabling process administrators to make systematic, quantitative improvements to these procedures.
IT Service Management
Although the IT organization was moving toward a standard infrastructure, many of the horizontal IT services were immature. Amentra created an organizational structure that acknowledged these shortcomings and augmented IT services where needed. This enabled the financial institution to conform to ITIL standards quickly, and without dependency on external groups that may not have the same urgency of delivery.
Enterprise Integration Services
The financial institution had very successfully implemented enterprise tools such as HP Service Desk for change management, and ClearQuest for incident management. While these tools proved very effective for managing individual IT services, it was difficult to pull this data together to produce a holistic view. Amentra developed the technical integrations needed to pull these disparate data sources into a common data model.

Applied technologies and expertise

Amentra's methodology mandates that all new projects scope out the work and success criterion at the beginning of an engagement. This clarifies and prioritizes the work for the consultant team, and facilitates a dialogue with the customer that helps set expectations. As a result of these discussions, governance and controls were marked as priority tasks. Amentra's key strength was the ability to leverage in-house knowledge of governance best practices and put into practice their extensive experience in business process reengineering.

Many management consultancy firms are able to run a project through the definition and analysis phase, but the ability to execute is where Amentra's reputation was built and that lineage was apparent in the implementation phase.

Amentra mentored the financial institution's associates on best practices within IT Systems Management specifically focusing on governance and controls, process management, ITIL, and EAI. Working alongside the financial institution's employees, Amentra created an organizational structure tailored for success within client's environment. The mentoring approach quickly enabled the financial institution's associates to be active contributors to the design phase, assisting with governance setup including staffing specified roles, tool configuration, and setting of clear governance responsibilities shaped within SLAs. Amentra implemented Governance and Process controls utilizing a combination of business process reengineering and measurement tool construction. The new structure represented existing business data within tools designed and developed for optimal organizational transparency to IT service health and performance.

The project was concluded on-time and on-budget, with Amentra ensuring comprehensive knowledge transfer of governance methodologies, setup and maintenance procedures; empowering the financial institution's associates with the tools for self led success.

Technologies used

  • WebLogic Server
  • Teradata
  • Oracle
  • HP Service Desk
  • IBM Rational ClearCase
  • Struts