Controlling application sprawl
A large bank in Korea has deployed software to improve production research and consolidate application sprawl. Woori Bank is using Plumtree's Enterprise Web Suite for 13,000 employees across 15 global bank branches.
Plumtree's open framework helped the bank rapidly assemble composite applications and integrate .NET and Java resources, as well as 100 backend systems, stemming from many numerous mergers and acquisitions, according to a recent news release from Plumtree.
"Accessing a century's worth of financial knowledge and a multitude of systems was quite a challenge for us," said Jong-shik Kim, chief of the computerized information task division at Woori Bank. "With Plumtree's open architecture, we have been able to build and manage composite applications that provide our employees with unified access to every information system in the company. We have also gained a competitive lead in Korea by implementing an advanced financial information infrastructure based on Plumtree's Web services architecture."
Using the new system, the bank centralized many systems into its portal, including credit risk management, accounting, executive information, human resource management and knowledge management systems.
One of the composite applications the bank built using the framework is a product research application. Bank tellers use it to search for and access relevant information about the bank's products, exchange rates and stock indexes. They also can collaborate with each other about new products via Q&As, discussions and secure instant messaging.
The bank also built a governance application to help employees easily search over 4,000 custom-built banking and reporting systems and 150,000 documents. Previously, with 20 to 30 systems in use per day, employees had difficulty locating the right system because they needed to open each system screen to find information. To reduce the system sprawl, the bank built crawler Web services to scan the interfaces of those systems and categorized them in the Knowledge Directory based on metadata. The bank set up a governance rule requiring that creators of new applications always include the appropriate metadata, so that it can be found easily in the future.
Plumtree reports that the deployment has improved bank employee productivity and satisfaction. For example, employees no longer have to wait for IT administrators to grant access to systems, freeing the IT team to focus on more strategic projects.