Wall Street & Technology - Application Lifecycle Management Speeds Product Delivery at Raymond James Financial

Application Lifecycle Management Speeds Product Delivery at Raymond James Financial

Application lifecycle management (ALM) tools are being adopted at Raymond James Financial to improve time to market time to market and reduce IT inefficiencies.

By Anne Rawland Gabriel
január 22, 2008

For the past 30 years, application development has been a black-box proposition -- dump resources into IT and, eventually, a business tool comes out. If deliverables were meeting expectations, perhaps this paradigm would endure. But, as few would argue, they are not.

Originally, the problem was a lack of standards and process standardization as application vendors battled for dominance. Today, it's equally about organizational dynamics.

"With organizations functionally siloed, there's a group of developers, a group of testers, a group of project managers, a group of business analysts," points out Carey Schwaber, a senior analyst with Forrester Research (Cambridge, Mass.). "They all have their own separate asset repositories, typically in the form of word processor documents and spreadsheets stored across network directories and drives."

Compounding the problem is a lack of automated management tools. "Unless you can look across all project domains, you don't know whether 'requirements plus test case plus code equals deployable software,'" says Schwaber. "Most organizations spend countless days manually building nightmarish spreadsheets, but human beings don't truly gain useful insights from complex matrixes. ... And depending upon where such documents are stored and who has access to them, it will become increasingly difficult to meet regulatory requirements for tracking and validating asset usage."

Fortunately, the IT industry itself is delivering technologies to help. Known as Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), the emerging solutions centralize organizational assets without upending organizational charts. According to IDC, the ALM market will grow to $3.3 billion worldwide by 2009 as competitive forces continue to pressure IT departments to add transparency and reduce time to market.

Theoretically, ALM solutions enable assets to remain the domains of their respective business units while granting individuals access rights to view, utilize, modify or create assets. Further, the latest ALM solutions enable components developed for one process to be efficiently identified and reused.

Time to Market Improvement

Such were the goals at St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Raymond James Financial. "We're always involved in dozens of complex projects as well as countless maintenance assignments," relates Mark Abbott, the firm's VP of IT. "We were managing all of them with basic productivity tools such as documents and spreadsheets. It was impossible to keep up, particularly when we were trying to manage the interdependence of these projects.

"By early 2005 we began an internal initiative to run our 800-employee IT division with the same discipline as a stand-alone business," Abbott continues. "Although our customers were happy with the software we developed, we needed to improve our time to market by streamlining processes." Among other things, this meant better source code control, he notes.

When the project began, the firm's existing development repositories were localized and inefficient, according to Abbott. "While those tools were workable at the team level, we wanted to bring repositories to the enterprise level," he says. "As we were moving toward service-oriented architecture, it was imperative to move development assets from residing within small teams to being available across the IT enterprise."

Primarily a Microsoft LAN-enabled shop with an HP Nonstop mainframe, Abbott's IT organization researched a half-dozen ALM players; three were invited to participate in a hands-on proof of concept. "We migrated several applications into the prospective tools," explains team member Sue Desiderio, Raymond James' manager of software engineering. "Then we updated the applications using our [Microsoft] Visual Studio development environment to prove that the hooks worked for drawing code into the ALM solution."

Beyond Code Lockdown

During this process, Austin, Texas-based Borland Software Corp. demonstrated that ALM concepts could go beyond locking down code, according to Abbott. "As we proceeded, we realized we were modifying the whole way we deliver software and manage life cycles," he says. "Beyond source code control, we lacked the tooling necessary to keep track of multiple complex requirements and interdependent projects. We needed automated ways to gather information from our customers, develop architectural requirements, store business and architectural requirements, leverage requirements enterprisewide, trace all instances of any given code, roll back to earlier versions for troubleshooting and so on."

Borland's focus on the complete software development life cycle made it the only vendor with support across the entire space, Abbott asserts. "With Borland, we could replace hundreds of documents and spreadsheets with something really exciting," he says. "We initially purchased the source code control solution in late 2005, but we continued to invest and deploy. Today, we're in the later phases of implementing an entire ALM suite solution from Borland."

Since the targeted project mushroomed into a systemic overhaul, culture change was the primary deployment challenge, Abbott notes. "Buying the tools is easy," he says. "Getting users to accept a structured methodology is harder."

To speed acceptance, Raymond James borrowed Software Engineering Institute concepts to create a peer-driven implementation process. Essentially, associate-level individuals from different units are tapped to serve on technical working groups, Abbott explains. These groups drive the adoption of a specific tool, methodology or process.

"Groups are generally three to six people, none of whom report to anyone else in the group," adds engineering manager Desiderio. "We block off time on people's calendars to ensure they can devote time to meaningful implementation issues. ... People are better at accepting change when we say, 'This is what your peers designed.'"

Proving the Point

While Abbott and Desiderio admit to discovering some gaps that Borland reportedly is now closing, they say the solution's overall benefits have been seismic. "We can't say we're 50 percent finished with gathering requirements when someone can log in and see that nothing's been done," Abbott points out. "Also, important tasks, like checking code into a repository, have gone from four or five hours to five minutes. Plus, support and maintenance completion times are significantly faster. ... In short, we're shipping projects at a volume that we've never done before."

Efficiency also has improved in other areas of the organization, notes Desiderio. "Since we have enterprisewide visibility, we're seeing less duplication," she says. "When a business unit asks us to add a feature to a particular application, we can research existing options and say, 'Hey, it already exists in this other tool -- perhaps we don't need it again.'"

For Borland, the Raymond James initiative proves a key claim: that the vendor's so-called "Open ALM" suite brings more than functionality to the table. "Raymond James developers work with a variety of technologies -- Java, Oracle, UNIX, Microsoft," says Marc Brown, Borland's VP of product marketing. "Our solutions support them all, irrespective of vendor. By leveraging open standards, we're eliminating islands of data and providing personalized visibility at every level."

In fact, Borland has defined the Open ALM subcategory thus far, according to Forrester's Schwaber. "ALM is relatively immature," she says. "Most vendors ... only offer tools dedicated to a certain lifecycle stage."

Still, Schwaber strongly recommends end users ditch the spreadsheets. And she argues against using auditor satisfaction as a justification for delay. "You're never going to hear auditors complaining about the inefficiency of reviewing hundreds of spreadsheets because they're paid by the hour," she asserts. "To build a clear business case, just look at pioneers like Raymond James and see what they've accomplished."

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