Case Study: CashDraw Bank

Company Profile

CashDraw Bank started out twenty years ago as a small community bank serving rural communities throughout South Africa. It was so successful that it now has 470 branches and is listed on the JSE. Nevertheless, CashDraw Bank still focuses on providing finance at reasonable rates to small communities for development projects (infrastructure/development banking) and to individuals (retail banking) to help them survive difficult times. The high-level structure of CashDraw Bank is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: High-level structure of the company

External business environment

The banking industry is very competitive because there are many different banks competing for the same customers. While business is good at CashDraw Bank, CashDraw Bank strives for a bigger market share by focusing on customer service improvements, cost reductions and efficiency gains by doing the same work with less resources and reducing waste, duplication and rework.

Information Technology (IT) in the company

Information Technology (IT) is critical to CashDraw Bank because IT enables customers to draw money at automated teller machines (ATMs), do online and mobile banking, buy groceries, petrol and other items at remote card machines and manage their finances. Internally, IT enables CashDraw Bank to operate efficiently and effectively, deliver financial services and provide quality customer service.

However, recently, the banks IT operations have become chaotic. Customers have started complaining to the newspapers and on social media, and some have even closed their bank accounts and gone to other banks. Even the business staff at the bank are complaining. Unfortunately, the IT staff do not seem concerned since they are only accountable to other IT staff, all the way up to the Head of IT. No IT staff member is accountable directly to any business staff or bank customers.

Some of the current problems include large numbers of unanswered and unresolved support calls and support e-mails, frequent system crashes, business staff being locked out of their accounts for no reason, ATMs that stop working while customers are using them, the internet banking site and mobile banking often hangs and the systems at the branches often disconnect from the centrally located transaction servers.

The IT departments structure is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The IT departments structure

Significant IT problems/issues/circumstances at the company

The IT department ran many IT projects involving systems comprising multiple components, integrated with other systems and with multiple dependencies. The Head of IT realised that many of the IT departments projects failed due to deficient configuration management resulting in insufficient control over the various components that make a project successful. It was clear that configuration management was vital because it provided a blueprint of the IT services, the underlying architecture and an accurate reflection of the connected pieces and dependencies. It was this network of components that made IT services work and having it in an accessible and usable form would allow IT to make changes to the IT services with ease, identify business impacts with minimal analysis and resolve outages quickly. Configuration management was a tool required for a successful IT department in an environment where IT service changes happen frequently, and internal and external customer requirements change just as often. The Head of IT decided to ask a DevOps expert to explain to her the important aspects of DevOps configuration management.

To address the many IT issues at the bank, the Head of IT began analysing the banks service value chain to see where she could start to improve things, since a service value chain is an operating model that specifies the main activities required to address demand and enable value creation through products and services. Following the analysis, the Head of IT discovered shortcomings with user support tasks; detailed requirements, requests and feedback from internal and external customers; architecture and policies; and service performance information.

Problems continued when new or changed IT services were moved from the development team to the IT operations staff. When new or changed IT services were moved into the production environment there were problems, which included the IT operations staff not knowing exactly how the new or changed IT services worked, the business users complaining that the new or changed IT services did not do exactly what they specified, and unforeseen faults.

Which one of the following answer options contains the HIGHEST NUMBER of important aspects that the DevOps expert would have explained to the Head of IT?

Item
	A	B	C	D	E
Request for change (RFC).	X	X	X	X	X
Artifact repository.	X			X
Seven-Step Improvement Process.	X	X	X	X	X
Distributed version control system (DVCS).	X	X
Continuous deployment.	X	X	X	X	X
Centralized version control system (CVCS).	X				X
Comprehensive configuration management (CCM).		X	X	X	X
HP LoadRunner.	X		X	X	X
Version control systems.	X	X	X		X
Source code repository (SCR).		X		X	X
Subversion (SVN).		X	X
Change Advisory Board	X	X	X	X	X

A.

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B.

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C.

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D.

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E.

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