technical excellence award
Presented to the organization that presents the best example of system engineering and architecture, system integration or technology management in conjunction with a CSC solution. Winners will exhibit high degrees of innovation, leverage and value and will be proven in actual business use.
Farm Bureau Mutual, Iowa
Project Title: ezTracker Implementation
Project Description: Project Objective: To increase the number of system changes within a shorter period of time and with more quality so the business can be more nimble in the insurance industry. Project Description: Farm Bureau Mutual, Iowa is a multi-line property and casualty insurer who partnered with CSC to develop ezTracker. This embedded POINT IN tool tracks application updates for tables, screens and ALR components, enabling the movement of individual changes from one IT environment to the next. This significantly reduces the need to group system changes and allows for specifically marked system changes to be promoted from development to test to production. The controlled data movement is accomplished by enforcing project-level code tagging and SQL functions seamlessly interwoven with the Implementer tool. The benefits of ezTracker are immediate. As soon as an IT department implements ezTracker’s system of unique issue identifiers, they are available for use. These identifiers are used to single thread system changes without intermixing other coding changes, allowing for concurrent development of multiple complex or simple changes with minimal impact on each other. This eliminates locking application components by one user or project so that no one else can make changes, which can delay all other activity. The result is a much more efficient movement of individual project changes into higher level environments resulting in: isolated testing to avoid non-relational ties to other changes; reduced testing time; more system changes to coexist without code contention; more changes accomplished in a shorter period of time; increased flexibility in prioritizing changes; and a more efficient IT department. Project Results: Major delivery improvements associated with the amount of time it takes to move changes have been realized, along with allowing moves to occur on a more frequent basis. In the first month of use, code moves increased and a minimum of 132 hours of staff hours were saved on 44 moves. Overall, ezTracker has provided the ability to implement faster, smarter and more effectively to meet dynamic business needs.
