Case Studies: Fortune 500 Bank
The Client
a Fortune 500 financial services company, advises clients around the world in all aspects of finance.
The Challenge
The financial services industry critically depends on up-to-the-minute information. However, when the client merged with another large bank, it quickly became obvious that the cost would be prohibitive to maintain two large, complex Content Management System (CMS) software suites. After much analysis, the decision was made to migrate from IXOS-Obtree, which the client used, to TeamSite used by the bank it merged with.
If successful, the project dubbed OneCMS would bring economies of scale and increased productivity, as well as the efficiency of dealing with a single vendor, the capacity to upgrade or patch all subsystems simultaneously, the ability to replicate content without conversion risks and a single data repository for data mining.
On the other hand, failure could cripple the new company. Numerous mergers have ended in disaster simply because IT departments could not solve systems conversion or data migration problems. It was essential for OneCMS to be conducted carefully, seamlessly and quickly.
The Solution
To capture a fundamental understanding of the general requirements, architecture and methodology, Quotient consultants spent five days on site in Zurich, Switzerland with the client's CMS team. They developed a formal and comprehensive Statement of Work (SOW), which contained:
- A risk assessment
- Examples of best practices
- Hardware architecture
- Software architecture, including a data model, metadata requirements, branch and directory structure and multiple language support
- A description of custom system tools to be developed for OneCMS
- Criteria for a non-Interwoven (WYSIWYG) editor to integrate with—and improve upon—TeamSite's editor
- Workflows and the custom scripts required to support their functionality
- Techniques for knowledge transfer
- Templates and filtering rules
- A project plan and schedule, including timelines and deliverables
Each of these topics was broken down into intricate detail. For example, to enable the new CMS suite to support multiple languages, language codes were specified for the names of the directories and for how every work area, staging and edition branch was to be set up. Five findings of potential risk were documented, and deliverables (system tools) were described for Perl code to be written as adjuncts to the base system.
The Results
A seamless, flexible process
Despite being spread over several locations on two continents, the Quotient/Fortune 500 Bank team bypassed time zone differences and communicated seamlessly and productively using a partnered extranet with issue management tools and environment sharing applications. The status of projects and issues were continually updated and available to all team members, eliminating the need for frequent conference calls.
To develop the base system and these new tools, Quotient's OneCMS team created and verified a development environment that mirrored the client's production environment—with quality assurance and flexibility built in every step of the way. For example:
- Periodic test releases confirmed that all coding conformed to production standards.
- All iterative and regression test findings were addressed.
- Because the team had the real-time data necessary to make production recommendations during development, they could requisition the appropriate hardware and allocate network architecture resources early on.
Even as the project deliverables were being refined, Quotient was able to confirm that the team's initial recommendations could support any new requirements—eliminating the risk of last-minute hardware requisition difficulties during rollout.
A fully-customized product
To ensure employees from both the client and it's merger partner could easily use the new OneCMS, the team developed a Content Editor tailored specifically to the newly-merged company's needs. For example, the Editor:
- Can either stand alone or be fully integrated with Interwoven's TeamSite content management application.
- Requires no previous knowledge or experience with the TeamSite application interface. Insulates the user from any interaction with TeamSite during page creation.
- Allows only layout and formatting components defined by the client's web content design guidelines, yet is fully configurable through an administrative interface to support evolving design guidelines. Users can save and re-use page templates.
- Supports content in English, German, Italian, French and Spanish, and is fully UTF-8 compliant.
- Collects and manages metadata, for whole pages and page elements, and repurposes content across the enterprise to reduce redundancy.
- Creates and manages breadcrumb trails and multi-level navigation menus, including those from the existing site directory structure and file content. A custom content crawler builds menus based on existing content, which users can edit and save.
Scalability to support growth and enhanced features
Quotient currently is augmenting the Editor to provide a complete user interface to the TeamSite workflow components, so that page and web content creation can all be managed intuitively from one interface.
The team also is developing support for additional languages, browsers and operating systems, further making the Editor a wide-spectrum solution to a broad range of content management needs.
The Insight
When it comes to performance, responsiveness and value, bigger isn't necessarily better. The customer selected Quotient from a wide range of possible vendors because:
- Quotient is an industry leader in CMS deployment, with substantial TeamSite experience.
- Quotient consistently delivers projects on time and within budget.
- Quotient hires and retains top-level professional consultants.
- To ensure the quality of deliverables, Quotient follows software development best practices and strict process methodology.
- Quotient management is committed to complete client satisfaction—the ultimate test of any product or service.
Case Studies
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Case Studies: Fortune 500 Bank
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