** Background **
Since 1988 Barclays Life Assurance has been growing a successful life and pensions business but as the number of clients passed one million, the overnight batch process began creeping into the on-line day. As well as broken SLA’s, the cost of this ‘creep’ was estimated at £70 in lost business for every minute the on-line system was down. The company had completed a major re-engineering exercise a few years before to address the same problem, this provided some temporary relief but now Barclays needed something more.
** The Challenge **
Redvers Consulting Ltd was asked to analyse the situation and come up with a list of suggested solutions for evaluation. The client’s users were adamant that no functionality was to be lost and that no policies were to be removed or archived from the database no matter how obsolete. The mainframe computer on which the life and pensions application ran was administered by a separate division of Barclays and the service was billed on a CPU usage basis, this made it impossible to reduce physical I-O by store/search techniques.
** Solutions **
Statistics were gathered to identify the overnight critical path and the longest running programs. For each case in point the following questions were asked:
· Was the data available elsewhere on the system in a more efficient form?
· Could the logic be changed to be more selective on input?
· Was all the processing necessary in order to produce the required output?
· Could the logic be ported to a different program if it used the same inputs?
· Did the output actually go anywhere?
As expected the above questions found many positive responses which resulted in 19 independent solutions for evaluation each of which could be applied in series or simultaneously.
** Results **
15 of the 19 solutions were implemented over 5 months resulting in a 40% reduction in overall run times. One program went from a run time of two hours to three seconds.
** Conclusion **
Changes to the application over 12 years of evolution had repeatedly fulfilled business demands but ignored the needs of IT. The optimisation project gave us a chance to view the system from an IT standpoint and address these needs. Any mature application, no matter what platform, language or industry, will have been repeatedly contorted from it’s original form in order to align it’s self with the business. The result is confused reactive systems instead of capable proactive ones.
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Redvers
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