Citigroup
Global trouble management system
Citigroup, formed in 1998 by the merger of Citicorp and Travelers, is now the most profitable financial services company in the world, with some 100 million customers in more than 100 countries.
Challenge
Citigroup is a global organization, with operations in 203 countries and 4 major regions. Each of these regions utilizes a unique trouble management system, tracks different information, and uses its own reporting metrics.
Citigroup identified the need for a centralized trouble management system that would meet the data collection, storage, and reporting requirements of the various regions. The system had to provide a web-based interface that offered country, region, and global views of this data; in particular, computationally intensive application level metrics like uptime, response time, and average time-to-repair. Regional data administrators also required an intuitive interface for entering application and outage data into this system.
In short, Citigroup needed a scalable, high-performance, highly available system that would grow to become the master repository of all application and outage data within their company.
Solution
Übermind worked with Citigroup teams from the different regions to understand their individual trouble management systems. This laid the groundwork for the definition of a global application management data model that met the various regions' data entry, collection, storage, and reporting requirements.This data model was implemented as a set of JDO compatible classes that are accessed through an EJB API. The data model was designed to be both flexible and maintainable, much of it being auto-generated from a UML modeling tool.
Übermind engineers built a servlet/jsp presentation layer that utilized the model-view-controller, command, and target-action patterns to accelerate the development of web-based J2EE applications. This framework, in conjunction with the data model, was used to develop the Dashboard application. Dashboard provides the user with various views to drill down to specific application instances for which they can view uptime, average time to repair, and on time delivery metrics. It also provides various other views that allow data administrators to enter application availability and trouble ticket related data using an intuitive calendar interface.
Since most of the regions currently use a Microsoft Access database and Microsoft Excel for reporting, they required a way for users to migrate data from their own database into the shared (global) Dashboard database. To accomplish this, Übermind team members implemented a SOAP web service that could be invoked directly from Microsoft Excel for mass data entry of application and outage data.
Results
- Global data solution
- Improved efficiency of core business activities