GuardIEn at ING

ING - Company Profile

ING Group is a global financial institution of Dutch origin, active in the field of banking, insurance and asset management in 65 countries with more than 100,000 employees.

In 1990 ING standardised on the use of CA Endevor for controlling all mainframe software. At ING, Endevor handles all of the processes necessary to implement an application, for example, code compilation, link-edits and DB2 binds.

In 1993 ING started to use Gen as a core application development tool. A key requirement for being able to deploy the applications was the ability to transfer Gen generated code into Endevor. The first approach that ING adopted was to customise the Gen program to implement a basic interface. However this approach suffered from a number of disadvantages. Firstly the interface required all developers to understand the details of using Endevor and also the associated mainframe tools. Secondly there was no direct integration between the Gen models and the code in Endevor - they could easily become out of synch. Finally, the interface had to be maintained by ING and the customisations re-implemented for each new release of Gen.

In 1997 ING decided to investigate alternative approaches to integrating Gen with Endevor. The leading product for Gen change and configuration management was the GuardIEn tool from UK based Information Engineering Technology Ltd (IET). The big advantage of GuardIEn was its close integration with Gen. IET offered to develop an interface to Endevor which would allow GuardIEn to manage the Gen models and associated code generation processes and then automatically handover the implementation of the code to Endevor.

ING commenced the implementation of GuardIEn in December 1997 and a joint project to specify the Endevor interface was commenced in early 1998. The first release of the interface was delivered to ING in April 1998. February 2000 saw the acquisition of Sterling Software by CA, and thus CA now owned both Gen and Endevor. CA started discussions with IET regarding the use of GuardIEn and the Endevor interface to enable CA customers to benefit from closer integration of the two products. As a CA Solution Partner, IET were able to install Endevor on their own S/390 mainframe and start a programme to considerably enhance the integration between GuardIEn and Endevor. ING provided valuable input to the specification of the enhancements, and a major new release of the interface was delivered in March 2001.

The main benefits that ING derive from the interface are:

• Better control. Because GuardIEn automates the Gen model management and implementation processes, it ensures that all changes to the Gen models and associated generated code are properly controlled and only authorised changes are promoted to the next environment.
• Simpler to manage. All of the Gen change control is managed by a single process. The developers do not need to use separate products with complex working practices to ensure that they remain synchronised. The error checking and restart capabilities that have been built into the latest release means that GuardIEn will only re-submit those modules that failed. GuardIEn allows the developers to view the results of the Endevor processing from within GuardIEn so that they can easily determine the cause of any errors and correct them as required.
• Better productivity. The complete automation of the implementation process has removed much of the complexity inherent in the original manual interface that was developed by ING. This has meant that the developers can now concentrate on modelling and designing the systems in Gen and leave the system implementation tasks to GuardIEn.
• Limited requirement for technical knowledge. The developers do not need to be experts in Endevor or other mainframe tools. This is especially important to ING because a part of the code construction activity is outsourced to offshore development factories, where the development teams are often not familiar with the ING mainframe environment.

Commenting on the success of GuardIEn at ING, Ferd Scheepers noted: "Our development factory base on GuardIEn was recently evaluated by our IAD (Internal Audit Department), which gave us an "A" rating, something that is almost unheard of. The Gen development factory is the only development factory in ING that has an "A" rating, and GuardIEn was instrumental in achieving this"