The standardisation of disparate systems is a major undertaking by organisations that no longer wish to duplicate effort when upgrading systems or migrating information. Many financial institutions who have inherited systems through acquisition or merging are faced with enormous amounts of duplication resulting in wasted budget and the inefficient use of personnel and technological resources.

For such a project, the need to have the project team resourced by experienced project managers and other critical positions is paramount to success. Additionally the need for an organisation to work with any vendor and be independent is necessary to ensure a harmonious working relationship, Initio is such a company.

During the course of a systems life cycle, version upgrades and enhancements are part of the system maintenance. Due to the independence of Initio, we are able to work with any vendor and provide knowledgeable personnel to assist the vendor.

From time to time regulatory and policy changes have to be made to the systems. Personnel with experience in understanding what the business and system ramifications are for a Policy change; knowledge of the business and even more importantly the Australian regulations mitigates the risk of a simple erroneous policy change affecting thousands of Policy holders.

Experienced test personnel mitigate the risk of businesses being severely impacted by errors reaching the production environment. With offshore development and the outsourcing of critical functions, the emphasis on testing “in-house” under genuine operating conditions has grown considerably to guarantee sound system integrity prior to going live in a production environment.

The Post Implementation Review is an important phase that is often neglected in the race to implement a new system or change. All too often the business is satisfied with the systems implementation and “going live” rather than reviewing whether the Business Case, the ROI projection and the objectives of the implementation have been realised and the return maximised.

Initio has personnel experienced in managing offshore development resources as well as a testing service to enable testing of code in the actual production environment. Additionally Initio developed a system on behalf of a major Bank to enable remote users via a controlled and locked down thin client device to do development whist ensuring all data and intellectual property resides in the Bank’s Australian data centre.

This virtual desktop implementation was the first in Australasia, and provided the Bank with a world class solution to protect its intellectual property rights.