The Old Mutual, one of SA`s leading financial services organisations and a Fortune Global 500 company, has upgraded its information technology (IT) structures in a bid to enhance the support it gives to more than 350 internal, customer-facing business units.
In 2003, Old Mutual, which is listed on both the London and Johannesburg Securities Exchanges, launched an initiative to enhance the control it exercises over internal data processes and applications, improve IT productivity and reduce application development and maintenance costs across the board.
As part of this initiative it implemented the Advantage Repository for Distributed Systems (CAARDS) software solution from Computer Associates (CA).
"Our latest upgrade centres on this metadata management system," says Colleen le Roux, a Repository Specialist at Old Mutual`s head office in Cape Town.
"It involves the addition of CA`s data modelling system - AllFusion Erwin - and the establishment of an HTML interface allied to a complementary document management system," she says.
"The upgrade is designed to broaden the scope of the CAARDS application within Old Mutual to address business-oriented issues such as the need to reuse software assets and optimise the use and understanding of metadata."
According to Le Roux, metadata management is a critical success factor in enabling the Old Mutual to support service-oriented development of its internal applications.
"Policies, procedures and standards must be in place if we are to meet our goal of building a specialised cross-platform, cross-business metadata information store," she says.
This store is designed to assist the Old Mutual`s largest in-house IT shop - the Old Mutual Technology Solutions (OMSTA TS) department, which employs 400 people - to gain a holistic view of the organisation`s applications, across various platforms, enabling it to examine their critical interdependencies.
The OMSTA TS department is currently involved in the creation, maintenance and management of more than 600 active business process data models and physical models.
Says Le Roux: "Our emphasis has shifted. It is also on achieving business objectives in addition to IT goals. We are looking to contain costs through the greater reuse of code, and improve efficiencies through automating key tasks and eliminating redundancies - while meeting software Capability Maturity Model (CMM) conformance and business risk audit requirements."
Looking to the future, Le Roux says the OMSTA TS team is gearing up to link its current configuration to CA software management tools to address the needs of Old Mutual`s mainframe as well as client server environments.
"Our aim is to fully automate daily maintenance functions for CAARDS and eliminate all other modelling tools in use in Old Mutual," she adds.
Ren'e Pretorius, a senior technical consultant at CA, says the linking of CA`s AllFusion Erwin module to the CAARDS system will allow Old Mutual`s specialist staff to better visualise data structures to facilitate the organisation, management and moderation of data complexities and database technologies.
"For the first time, knowledge from Old Mutual`s metadata repository as well as its deployment environment - particularly information concerning the relationship between logical business information and physical technical information - will be returned to Old Mutual`s project teams, thereby increasing the resource capabilities of their systems significantly," he says.
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