IBM WebSphere Information Analyzer and Data Quality Assessment

418 IBM WebSphere Information Analyzer and Data Quality Assessment

2.1 Introduction

North American Bank provides core banking services such as savings, checking,

and auto and home loans in North America and has significant market share in

the eastern and midwest regions of the U.S. It additionally provides credit card

and auto insurance services to its customer base. The primary IT platform of this

bank is z/OS with DB2 and VSAM data sources.

Northern California Bank is a regional bank that provides core banking services

such as savings, checking, and auto and home loans in the western region of the

USA, and has significant market share in that region. It also provides brokerage

services to its customer base. The primary IT platform of this bank is AIX with

DB2 UDB as the data source.

Seeking a synergistic relationship, the two banks entered into a merger with the

intent of becoming a national bank by growing their individual customer bases,

and upselling and cross selling each others products’ to their individual

customers.

The two banks expect there to be some overlap of customers or groups of

customers (such as members of a single family), who when identified could be

granted special status. However, the two customer bases are mostly expected to

be non-overlapped.

2.2 Business requirements

With the objective of streamlining the combined IT operations of the two banks,

and taking advantage of the synergy of the products that are offered by the

individual banks in the most expeditious manner, management made a business

decision to implement the following strategy:

򐂰 Migrate the core services such as saving, checking, and auto and home

loans, from the North American Bank system implementations to the those

implemented by the Northern California Bank (generally considered to be

superior in function and architecture).

Chapter 2. Financial services business scenario 419

򐂰 Build a customer relationship management (CRM) system to quickly take

advantage of the individual brokerage, credit card, and auto insurance

business’ of each bank to upsell and cross-sell these products across the

customer base.

The CRM design is an “off-the-shelf” design that is customized to suit the

particular requirements of the merged bank. It integrates information from the

following sources with no changes in the interim to any of the existing

systems:

– Core business services from both the Northern California Bank and the

North American Bank

– Brokerage services from the Northern California Bank

– Credit card and auto insurance services from the North American Bank

򐂰 A decision on less essential services such as Human Resources systems in

each bank is deferred until the completion of the migration and CRM system

implementation.

򐂰 The migration and CRM implementation efforts are to proceed in parallel, with

no dependency of one over the other.

Therefore, the CRM system is designed to be sourced from the core services

of the individual banks even as migration of these systems is occurring from

one bank to the other. At the completion of migration of the core business

services, it would be easy to have the CRM sourced entirely from the

migrated system than both the systems by discarding data from the migration

source system.

Important: The general guideline when mismatches are found in the

migration scenario is to have the target system have the over riding

authority and not be modified except in absolutely unavoidable situations.

This means ignoring data elements in the source that have no

correspondence in the target, to truncate source data element content

when the target data element’s precision is lesser than that of the source,

and accept coarser granularity data content values supported by the target

where codes are involved. Judicious decisions involving minimal

modifications to the target system should be the norm when mismatches

are encountered.

Important: The general guideline during data integration is that when

there are mismatches between the sources and the new CRM system, that

the CRM system design be modified to accommodate the existing system

functions that are considered essential.