source : C3B Consulting’s INSIGHT-SPECTRA

Extract from Volume 23 Report 6; November 2010

Value-Base Case study: 

Applying common sense to using technology intelligently.

www.insight-spectra.com 

Management introduction

Imagine you are an IT service provider to a financial institution like a brokerage. It is 10 minutes to 4PM (when the markets close) and a $40M transaction has gone missing. If the trade is not completed, the brokerage will not only be liable for regulatory fines but also for interest foregone and, potentially, any price change that occurs the next day. It will hold its service provider liable if it proves to be an IT issue that has caused the problem.

This is a scenario that is all too common. The financial implications are unpleasant. The customer relationship implications are, if anything, worse.

This case study — which reaches across industries like aviation and finance in which sophisticated managed service providers operate — shows how it is possible to break out of the confining jail to which with much of operational IT seems to operate. The outcome of the (true) scenario above will be shared later but before that, consider what happened at a major international airline.

Source:C3B Consulting’s INSIGHT-SPECTRA

Extract Volume 1 Report 6; January, 2010

Value-based case study:

 Managing an MQSeries environment at USBank

www.insight-spectra.com 

 Management introduction

USBank is headquartered in Minneapolis and is #6 in the US (as measured by assets), USBank has some 50,000 employees. David Corbett is a middleware architect in the Bank. He focuses on multiple forms of middleware: this includes CICS and MQSeries plus TIBCO messaging (USBank, in common with most large organizations has no shortage of different forms of middleware installed).

In this case study, Mr. Corbett discusses the development and operational issues in USBank that arise with MQSeries and how these are managed. He describes issues arising between operations and development and explains how and why USBank introduced Avada Software's Infrared360 solution as a way to improve both the Banks’s application development and operational environments.

The business problem

We do not have, at USBank, a really complex MQSeries environment (I know of ones that are much more complex). Our MQSeries network supports traffic to and from the mainframes but there is also traffic over the MQSeries network that goes between non-mainframe (distributed) systems. MQseries is, therefore, an integral part of how we make applications work together within the Bank. As such we need access, for all sorts of valid reasons, to see what is happening in the queuing infrastructure — but with strict controls operating on what can be seen by whom (for security and confidentiality reasons).