Quelle: CIO Asia

In 2000, when David Malligan joined Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI), Indonesia's largest bank, as its CIO, the Australian native found himself needing to make some major changes. For years, BRI's core banking system had been decentralised: each of its 4,500-plus branches had its own server, did individual batch processing and kept separate databases.

Malligan, whose career in the Indonesian banking industry spanned 10 years, was hardly surprised at this nightmarish degree of decentralisation: after all, BRI was Asia's biggest bank outside of China and India, with 40 million accounts and a network of 12 regional offices, 323 branches, 64 sub-branches, 3,916 BRI Units and 238 Village Service Posts. Since its inception in 1895, the bank has gained profitability by providing loans and financial services to micro, small and medium enterprises in Indonesia. In 2002, loans to this market made up 90 percent of business.

The mechanics of how these loans are meted out does not worry Malligan: the data behind them is what has been keeping him busy. The bank recorded tremendous amounts of data locked up in separate databases from Progress Software Corp., running on Intel-based Unix operating systems. A sample of this data, which cover BRI's business lines and markets, include reports on weekly foreign currency positions, due dates of term deposits and funds available in the bank. They are used by divisions to present the bank's consolidated position and analyse its profitability. "The fragmented nature of our available data made it difficult to analyse the profitability of our business lines and verify if targets, say in lending, have been met. Having consolidated data is key to managing the bank's total portfolio effectively and efficiently. Better quality data would also improve reporting and our understanding of the bank's position," he says. The prior database systems churned out paper reports that left details out and could not be read online. User divisions that wanted reports had to go through long processes to acquire them because the branches operated on different systems than theirs.

In 2000, therefore, the bank set out to change all that. They consolidated their databases into a centralised, core banking system from Malaysian-based software firm Silverlake System Sdn Bhd, running on IBMIBM's AS/400 and DB2 database platforms, with the data warehousing application residing on MicrosoftMicrosoft's SQL database. The project was executed in two phases. The first was the implementation of the core banking system, which was up and running at the first BRI branch in January 2001. Currently, all branches have rolled it out. Phase two, which started in 2002, involved taking data from the Silverlake system and depositing it in the Microsoft data warehouse. By December 2002, 100 reports were in production, and now, all reports are accessible to divisions online. Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de

Malligan says that centralisation has changed data gathering processes. "This project created a single source of data so that everyone looks at the same figures. We have achieved statistical consistency, gotten a better understanding of the profit-and-loss picture, and can more confidently manage the information we have. Before, business divisions had different data sources, and branches were making their own Excel reports and sending them to the divisions--so each one ended up having different versions of the same data."