Standard Life gives customers continuous availability to CICS data

Introduction

Standard Life was the first life insurance provider to transact business in Canada 175 years ago. The Standard Life Assurance Company of Canada now provides asset-managing services to more than 1.3 million Canadians, including group insurance and pension plan participants.

Its products and services include group savings and retirement plans and group life and health insurance, as well as individual investment and protection solutions such as annuities, life insurance, segregated funds, and mutual funds.

Giving customers direct Web access to data

Like most companies operating in its sector in the past decade, Standard Life of Canada had been providing indirect access to customer data. Customers, advisors, and brokers could call or mail the company to update contact information, alter plans, and make changes to policies. With the explosion of the Web and its effect on the financial services industry, Standard Life knew that to stay ahead of its competition and meet customer expectations, it would need to provide direct Web access to customer data.

However, some of Standard Life's customer data is stored in backend mainframe applications that weren't accessible on the web. To overcome this issue, Standard Life developed an umbrella application to access the mainframe. Known as CLUE, the WebSphere-based application gives Standard Life customers the ability to view and update their annuity, life insurance, and other policy information from the Web.

But Standard Life wanted to do more for its customers. Both the annuity system and the life insurance application, known as CAPSIL, were closed every night so the company could run batch updates. These batch updates include processing transfers, deposits, address changes, new contracts, term deposits, and much more. Processing can consist of anywhere from 15,000 to 500,000 transactions per night. With batch requiring the applications to be closed, customers had no access to their data for most of the night. Standard Life believed that to provide customers true Web access, that access had to be continuous, which meant 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“As we made information available to clients outside of business hours, we could no longer have our applications shut down overnight,” said Guy Rémillard, the Manager of Systems Development for Systems Information Technology for Standard Life. “Standard Life of Canada wanted to differentiate itself with a high level of service to clients.”

Shadow files prove problematic for continuous availability

Initially, Standard Life looked at creating “shadow” copies of files as a means to providing continuous availability. With this type of solution, copies of files are created for the batch process, which the batch process then uses to update the information at night. During this time, customers view the original versions of the files. In the morning, when the batch process is complete, the shadow copies of the files with the updated information are restored for the online application to use.

But the solution proved problematic for several reasons. Creating shadow files required additional storage, increased overhead, and added cost. The process also required the shadow files to be re-created every night so that they reflected new data. And as soon as the batch process began updating the shadow files, the data that customers were viewing in the original files was no longer accurate.

Standard Life wanted customers to have continuous availability to the most current data possible and continued to look for a solution, which is when the company found SYSB-II from H&W Computer Systems, Inc.

SYSB-II is mainframe software that allows CICS and batch to have concurrent access to VSAM files. This means companies can process batch during the business day or night, while CICS applications and current data remain fully available to customers.

Standard Life provides continuous availability to data

When the SYSB-II solution was first proposed, at least one Standard Life systems engineer was skeptical.

“I didn't believe it. I made it very clear. I said I don't think SYSB-II can do this,” said Jane Triandos, a Senior Systems Specialist in Development for Standard Life.

“Jane is now the core defender of SYSB-II,” said Rémillard.

After bringing in SYSB-II, an H&W expert helped get Standard Life up and running with the product. This included getting the IT team members trained on the technology. Standard Life carefully evaluated its environment and began using SYSB-II with files that only required updates at night. Developers then tuned applications to work with SYSB-II, which proved to be straightforward.

“The changes that we made to our applications were not deep. They were light and repetitive,” said Rémillard.

With SYSB-II up and running, Standard Life began providing customers with continuous, around-the-clock availability to their data. Currently, Standard Life allows only inquiry access at night because of the nature of some of the financial transactions, and because update ability at night is not a current customer need. However, if customer demands change, the company is well-positioned to provide that ability.

“Right now, we run a step in the batch job that modifies a file control table and makes all the online transactions inquiry only. We would just have to remove that step to allow update ability,” said Triandos.

Standard Life also found that it could start providing more current data during the day. Because of SYSB-II, Standard Life implemented what it calls a “noon cycle” in which batch makes updates during the day without files being closed. These include updates to transfers from the previous night and other time-sensitive financial transactions. These daytime updates allow changes to be reflected in client balances much closer to real time, which is important to customer service.

Standard Life discovers unexpected benefits

With SYSB-II, Standard Life could provide customers continuous availability to data, which was the prime driver for the acquisition. However, the Standard Life IT team soon realized that SYSB-II offered much more.

Recovery from a failed batch run proved particularly painful for Standard Life developers. Typically this process meant an all-night ordeal looking into the last backup in the batch cycle, restoring to that point, and restarting everything.

For the main batch job, several jobs ran simultaneously against the same files, so operators had to be careful what they restored and when because the restore might overwrite something from another job. The team even developed what it called a “bingo card” and ruler to help with the various conditions involved in backing out. The bingo card was like a flowchart that mapped errors back to a possible point in time, so that the operator would know where to start the restore. The process was tedious and time-consuming, especially in the middle of the night. If the job failed to restore after one or two tries, developers would have to back out of the cycle and tell users the next morning nothing was updated overnight.

Standard Life discovered that SYSB-II provided an automated recovery process for abends. This feature made a huge difference to the developers who were responsible for keeping the system up and running.

Improving performance and cutting costs

Standard Life, like most companies with a mainframe, is continually seeking ways to improve performance and reduce operating costs. Developers found that the statistical information SYSB-II provides help with both goals.

SYSB-II statistical information gives IT staff insight into the internal processing that occurs within batch programs and CICS. For example, developers can see the requests, reads, and updates that a batch program performs and how that activity translates into potential overhead for CICS, when both CICS and batch are providing concurrent access to data. Standard Life developers use this information to help pinpoint areas for improvement.

“If I'm reading 5,000 policies and I'm doing 20,000 updates, I know I'm doing something wrong. I know I've got different programs doing an update all over the place. So then I investigate and try to optimize the programs,” said Triandos.

Use of the SYSB-II statistics has further spread into application development and QA to encourage more efficient programming. Developers are now more aware of their programming techniques and how even subtle changes can improve performance. They also know that SYSB-II will point out inefficiencies. This change has led to more efficient programs, which helps improve overall performance and reduce cost.

“It makes you think now when you program because you know SYSB-II will tell you. It's become like a habit,” said Triandos.

After finding ways to optimize programs and the batch process using SYSB-II, Standard Life has taken the process even further. This includes evaluating the cost of running short batch jobs verses longer ones, questioning the necessity of every batch job, and separating out inactive client records to reduce processing time.

“We go through and question everything. Why are we running these jobs?” said Lippiatt.

A company initiative has been seeking to reduce MSUs significantly. Already the company has introduced scheduling changes, performance enhancements, and other changes and realized impressive reductions.

Conclusion

Standard Life realized that continuous availability to customer data from the web would be a business differentiator and help the company remain competitive in the financial services industry. After initial skepticism from developers, the company successfully implemented SYSB-II from H&W Computer Systems to allow the batch process to run while CICS data remains available to clients.

Upon satisfying this critical business need, Standard Life developers discovered that SYSB-II offered many other benefits, including automated recovery from abends during the nightly batch. With SYSB-II, developers spend only minutes rather than hours to resolve issues and have the batch process up and running quickly, eliminating a time-consuming manual process.

Developers also realized that SYSB-II could help them improve their applications. Using the statistics that SYSB-II provides, developers found ways, which are now standard practices at the company, to optimize programs and improve programming. Standard Life developers remain adamant about the need for SYSB-II.

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