Banque de France Saves 40 Person Years' Work with Component-Based Technology and CGI

“From a development perspective, significant quality and stability gains were made as a result of CGI’s component reuse. This helped reduce our software maintenance costs. In addition, because the methodology and expertise needed to achieve a high reuse rate were transferred to the internal team involved in the project, other concurrent projects are benefiting from this knowledge transfer and achieving excellent reuse levels.”

Erick Lacourrège, CERES Project Manager, Banque de France.

In this ambitious undertaking, CGI France (formerly IMRglobal France) was able to leverage its expertise and apply its component-based development methodology to help the Banque de France achieve a daunting objective…

The Challenge
In early 1996, the bank recognized the need to improve its operations and systems with a view to adapting to a new financial environment. Top on the list was the imperative to support the EURO by January 1, 1999. Other needs included the migration from a decentralized CTOS architecture to a client/server architecture; the introduction of more ergonomic and modern applications to its considerable branch network; and the implementation of one new and unique chart of accounts for all central banks in the EURO-area as a result of its change of status.

Integrating 211 branches into one unique centralized information system is a challenge for any bank. For the Banque de France, this challenge was compounded by the need to accomplish the task in three short years thereby compressing at least 40 person years of work into the available time while still continuing to support its other IS initiatives. The solution was twofold: CGI and component-based technology.

In deciding to partner with CGI to launch the CERES project, a client server application, Erick Lacourrège, CERES project manager for Banque de France said, "We selected CGI for many reasons: their innovative approach, which matched our distributed architecture technology choices; their systems development experience within the banking industry; the creation of a partnership for transferring methodology and know-how to our internal teams and the availability of an industry-specific library of components."

The Strategy
To develop CERES, the development team used EDIFICE, CGI's component-based development methodology. This iterative approach speeds up the development process through the reuse of components from CGI's business component library.

CERES used CGI components for 71 percent of its code. As a result, the deployment process was accelerated, enabling developers to easily modify objects to address user feedback.

The 1,500 components created for CERES were grouped into a Banque de France object dictionary, a component library from which a standard kit slightly different from the kit used for the CERES project is now available for reuse in subsequent projects.

The Technology

• Oracle, UNIX, Windows NT and Tuxedo
• UNIX central server, and NT local servers
• 1,600 NT 3.51 client stations
• TCP/IP on Ethernet LANs in each branch; IP on X.25 WANS for intersite links

The Results
As a strategic client/server application, CERES serves the bank's 211 branches and works to facilitate management of banking activities including customer account operations, management of cash and national fiduciary activity and local clearance management. It serves 2,000 users, 1,500 of whom are concurrent. The FRF (French Franc) version was introduced on January 9, 1998 and the EURO version (for account maintenance of lending institutions and certain other customers) was introduced on January 4, 1999.

According to Lacourrège, the key to success in this ambitious development project—completed in three calendar years— was component reuse: "From a development perspective, significant quality and stability gains were made as a result of component re-use. This will help reduce our software maintenance costs. In addition, because the methodology and expertise needed to achieve a high reuse rate were transferred to the internal team involved in the project, other concurrent projects are benefiting from this knowledge transfer and achieving excellent reuse levels. More specifically, a new ongoing project (Paris Check Processing) is re-using CERES components and will achieve very high levels of direct CERES code reuse."