Sample Solutions 

Large International Insurance Organization – Waterloo, ON  

Situation:  The Advisor Intranet did not support secure document delivery. Delivery costs were increasing exponentially and legal confidentiality compliance was becoming a significant problem.  Although the Advisor Intranet supported general information and forms within a secure environment, it was not able to support secure delivery of client-related documents to the designated advisors and their assistants or dealerships. All confidential documents, such as Life Insurance Underwriting requirements and policy notifications, had to be delivered by Fax or printed and delivered by courier. The daily costs for faxing, printing and courier services to thousands of advisors across Canada were constantly escalating. Recent changes to the Client Confidentiality laws also required that the company was able to prove contractual compliance for their client document delivery processes.  

Solution:  By analyzing the existing advisor profile data within the Advisor intranet databases, I was able to define an algorithm that enabled the systems to automatically respond to the advisor's personal communication delivery preferences and validate whether the recipients were contractually allowed to receive the confidential client communications. This solution became the standard for all advisor intranet communications that required contractual compliance for their client's personal information.  

Result: Since the solution was created in 2002, it has been repeatedly used to deliver confidential client documents from multiple insurance and wealth management administration systems directly to the advisors (or their support staff). Not only has this already saved considerable delivery costs, but it conforms with the legal confidentiality compliance requirements.

Situation: Wealth Management Marketing Materials required Legal Compliance Review Approval.   The Advisor Marketing Materials Compliance Review team was unable to manage the high volume of email compliance approval requests and was not able to enforce the review and approval processes for marketing statements made by the advisors regarding the Wealth Management Products. The marketing team had less than 2 months to put an auditable process in place to meet their legal obligations. The process was completely dependent on emails, spreadsheets and manual processes that could not be enforced. They also had several technical gaps in their ability to meet all the compliance audit requirements.  

Solution: I designed a Lotus Notes database application that completely replaced their email and spreadsheet process and included all of the audit controls for process work flow, reviewer security and routing, secure storage of review comments and results with complete historical audit trail. The advisor representatives were able to submit marketing materials into the work flow application and the original materials along with all the reviewer comments and revisions were routed through the required departments for compliance review. The final archive locked in the final approved documents along with the review audit trail and could be stored and retrieved for up to 7 years as required if any legal issues were encountered.  

Result: The Wealth Management Marketing Materials Review team was able to meet their deadline for a legally compliant audit process in less than 2 months. The solution was configurable and flexible enough to also support other audit review processes for the Insurance division as well as the Wealth Management division. This eliminated the need to develop a separate custom application for other compliance audit review work flow processes.

Situation: The Advisor Business Transfer team had over 3000 legal contract transfer requests backlogged. They were managing the business transfer work flow with spreadsheets. Whenever an advisor sells or transfer their block of business, there is a complex administration work flow that must be enforced to ensure that the evaluation of the business is accurate and the contractual transfer of their assets is compliant with legal requirements. They were having considerable difficulty managing the work load and enforcing the process and the backlog of work was unmanageable.  

Solution:   By analyzing how they were working and by understanding the existing data and systems architecture, I was able to create a simple Lotus Database application that provided them with a secure and auditable system solution that replaced their existing spreadsheet solution and added a secure automated and auditable work flow process. This enabled the contract administration team to meet their goals for both legal compliance and service response times.  

Result:  The company was able to hire and train more admin staff to use the application to rapidly resolve the backlog of Advisor Business Transfer requests while ensuring that they were meeting their goals and legal requirements with a higher degree of accuracy and speed. The automated work flow also ensured that there was an auditable trail and archive of the contractual transfers to meet important legal compliance criteria.

Situation:   Third Party Agencies had only 3 months to adapt automated advisor compensation feeds to XML.  When the company converted the compensation systems to FASAT, the new XML for Life standard for external Third Party data feeds was implemented. Agencies were dependent on the old customized data feeds to their systems to allow them to automatically process the high volume of advisor compensation data. Three months before the system cut-over date, the agencies were informed that they needed to convert their existing feeds to adapt to the new XML for Life standard feed format.  

Solution:  By rapidly learning the technology and standards for XML for Life data, I was able to provide the required technical analytical support to these agencies to help them convert their existing data feeds to accommodate the new feed format in time to be able to automatically process the new compensation feed as soon as it was converted.  

Result: The agencies were able to seamlessly continue to pay their advisors through their existing back office systems without any delays in payment delivery. This was a significant win for the partnership between the company and the third party agencies. It also ensured that the company's external professional image was preserved by being able to convert to the new compensation payment system without any delays in payment to the advisors.

 Handspring – Mountainview, CA  

Situation:  Handspring needed to migrate their product supply chain web site to a new technology platform.  The migration teams were located in Waterloo, ON and Mountainview, CA.  

Solution:  With a distributed team in two time zones, it was essential to ensure that meetings and cross-training support were organized and focused.  Also, as a consulting team, it was necessary to provide forecasts and progress tracking for the $500,000 budget and identify issues as early as possible in the project.   

Result:  The Handspring store was migrated to the new platform and the new web site was up and running on time and on budget with minimal issues.

Ernst and Young – New Jersey, NY  

Situation:  The Ernst and Young head office IT department was challenged by the volume of business documents that needed to be posted to their centralized intranet web site.  Requests for updates to the intranet documents were submitted from departments across the company and across the country.  The work load was overwhelming the web site support team. 

Solution:  Using the available technology, I defined a complete solution (including the technical design, training materials and new operational business processes) that enabled each individual department to submit and maintain documents to the company intranet site independent of the web site support team.  The solution supported and ensured proper security control and document version management.  

Situation:  Disney Online needed a solution to manage the production of their web site.  They had web site contributors from various departments (artists, copy writers, technical team, marketing) who needed to collaborate to make a single web page.   The web assets needed to be assembled and previewed by the producers prior to posting them to the live web site.  They also needed a solution to keep track of the source files that were used to generate the web assets as well as organizing the feedback and revision requests to each of the contributors.   

Solution: I defined a system solution that collected and organized the various components of the web pages from each of the contributors, assembled them into a preview page and allowed the supervisors to record notes/feedback for each of the individual components of the page.  The solution also assembled and promoted the web assets to the production web server according to the production schedule as long as each of the components were reviewed and approved by the supervisors.  

Social Security Administration – Baltimore, MD  

Situation:  The SSA needed a secure intranet solution to be able to control modifications to their internal process documentation.  The solution had to provide auditable control over who could modify the documents and who could review and approve the changes.   

Solution: By modifying an existing web-based interface tool and defining appropriate configuration and processes, I designed a solution that allowed the SSA to load all their documents into a web site and, based on the security levels, allow users to view and modify the web documents while maintaining a repository of previous versions of the documents. 

Result:  The SSA was able to upload, modify and manage their internal operational process documents through a secure intranet with appropriate audit controls.

Situation:  IBM wanted a proof-of-concept application to demonstrate potential solutions to the Radiologists of Quebec as part of their new OS390 mainframe sales process.  They wanted to show the system selection committee how they could use a secure web-browser application to do remote diagnostics with radiology images. 

Solution:  By researching the latest trends in technology for remote medicine, I was able to design a proof-of-concept web application that demonstrated how a doctor could access and view patient data and radiology images, dictate the diagnosis into a voice recognition tool and store the diagnosis in the secure patient database.  

Result:  IBM successfully sold the new OS390 mainframe systems and services to the Quebec Radiologists association. 

 IBM Canada – OS 390 migration project for Bell Atlantic Mobile 

Situation:  IBM was hired to manage the OS390 system migration project for Bell Atlantic Mobile and they hired a consultant team to provide additional UNIX and ORACLE experience to Bell during the migration project.  I identified a gap in communications between the remote teams and advised IBM to pull the team together for a systems architecture walk-through. 

Solution:  During the systems architecture meeting, I facilitated the team of experts to identify and diagnose various gaps in the solution and defined solutions for the identified gaps. 

Result:  The systems architecture walkthrough helped to identify key gaps very early in the process.  The teams adapted their solutions and the migration project was a success with minimal issues.

Situation:  Unitel needed to launch the new 1-800 service offering in 3 months in order to meet their planned market window for the product launch.  They required a system solution to be able to enter customer orders, send instructions to the network provisioning team and be able to provide customer service.   

Solution:   The IT team had agreed to provide an order entry application in 3 months.  By defining a user interface that structured the order entry process based on an Object Oriented model of the 1-800 service, it was possible to build one application that supported order entry, network provisioning/configuration and customer services within the same budget and timeline.  The application was also used to trigger the interface feed to the billing systems once the service was activated.  The application provided a seamless front-end to multiple large legacy systems and electronic data interfaces. 

Result: Unitel launched the 1-800 product on time with systems support for multiple departments. They were able to take accurate service orders, set up the complex 1-800 services and provide integrated customer support.  First quarter sales results far exceeded the forecast.

Situation:  For the 1-800 service, regulations specified that network charges had to be billed within 4 months.  There was $500,000 in network calls that were not linked to the customer billing data.  The business groups were not able to diagnose the source of the problem or correct the data. 

Solution:  By analyzing the data and tracing the issues in the system, I was able to identify the customer and correct the systems to ensure that the billing systems were able to identify the customer and link the call data charges to the correct customers.   

Result:  Within 2 weeks, the systems were adjusted and the data was reprocessed resulting in billing $500,000 accurately before the time limit ran out.

 NCR Waterloo  

Situation:   NCR required an application that enabled customers to configure document forms for electronic image recognition.  There were no product specifications. 

Solution:  Using Object Oriented Analysis principles, I designed a generic Window-based application that displayed the image of a form and allowed the user to identify rectangular zones and define the type of recognition that would be used in the zones.  The coordinates and recognition instructions could then be uploaded into the Document Management System for automated document processing.   

Result: By using a more generic approach based on Object Oriented design principles, the same application could be used for multiple image processing product lines.