Designing a Technical Solution for Commercial Lending
Having been involved in Fulton Financial‘s commercial loan origination project since its earliest stage, we were well-positioned to bridge the gap between the business and its implementation partner, ensuring technical reality aligned with business need.
Business System Integrations
This technology-business alignment included integration specifications for 13 business systems that had to work with the commercial lending solution. These systems ranged from externally-hosted industry-standard services to locally-hosted enterprise software solutions. To identify all integration points and processes, we researched APIs and coordinated with system administrators, contract owners, external software vendors, and technical personnel. The resulting interface control documents included
- detailed technical requirements
- logical diagrams and physical diagrams of technology components and communication methods in the interfaces
- data context diagrams and data models to illustrate data structures and data flows
- activity diagrams to describe technical processing steps initiated by interface operations
- notional data mapping based on business-identified data elements and data elements exposed by interfacing system APIs
To further assist in the integration analysis, we provided options analyses to business and technical stakeholders, to inform their decisions on final system integrations. For example,
- Engage a development partner to create a custom interface with an existing legacy system? Or utilize the new commercial platform’s integration with a different third party application?
- Pass system communication through a single enterprise service bus or integration platform as a service (iPaas)? Or develop point-to-point integrations?
Analysis of each alternative was based on the solid technical expertise of our solution architects coupled with a deep understanding of the business requirements. With our facilitation of options analysis discussions, the Fulton team quickly came to consensus and allocated resources accordingly.
Best Practice Solution Design
In parallel with the integration design, we partnered with Fulton’s IT stakeholders in development of a solution design. Using solution architecture best practices and multiple facets of Fulton’s IT governance guidelines, a technical design was created using system context, logical, physical, and data context diagrams. In addition, our design
- identified technical and procedural risks to the solution, based on design decisions
- quantified expected user and data volumes
- described high-level disaster recovery requirements (Recovery Time Objective/Recovery Point Objective)
- documented IT stakeholder support responsibilities
- provided an overview of the solution’s scalability options
- documented open issues and design decisions
The solution design was a critical deliverable meant to not only memorialize the design decisions for audit purposes, but also empower the Fulton team in their solution implementation.
Our on-time delivery of high-quality artifacts, planning, and facilitation was crucial to presenting a clear understanding of Fulton’s business need and keeping the enterprise project on track, especially with its highly visible schedule constraints.
Our approach to business analysis and solution architecture along with experienced workshop facilitation brought everyone together effectively and efficiently, resulting in mutual recognition, decision-making, and a clear path to implementing a successful enterprise loan processing solution.
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