Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 2.1.
First step: the data repository
For instance, a large regional bank holds a legacy banking
IT platform, with repositories to configure its products and
services that bring together thousands of reference and
master data values. Certain values in this data depend on
the specifics or business variants within the regional
banking branches. The bank personalizes its products and
services, depending on the region. In the existing IT system,
the reference and master data is trapped in files and
heterogenous databases (VSAM, DB2, Oracle and other
configuration files) but also in software packages. The user
interfaces of this data administration are heterogenous, not
very ergonomic and not sufficiently secure to make them
available to business users. The functional teams express
their banking product configuration needs in the form of
textual specifications. These are retaken manually by IT
staff who become responsible for setting the parameters of
