A brief history of data quality or – the birth of OMrun. Part 1: Complexity is only the first name

It all started more than 15 years ago when the core business of OMIS AG (the previous owner of OMrun) was consulting services.

At this time, senior consultant and CIO Frank Zeindler was engaged in a mandate for a major Swiss bank. Frank was a project leader and responsible for the further development of an application in the credit and loan department.

In large organizations, the process to deploy new software is a rather complex task. And major Swiss banks – certainly in the years 2000 – are very large organizations.
To illustrate this fact, quickly imagine yourself the “application landscape” of that bank. The application landscape was a display of the application architecture showing all applications and interfaces involved to run the bank. This application landscape also existed as a print-out-version. As such, it was a piece of paper with the approximate dimensions of 1m x 2m and the descriptions of the “boxes” and “arrows” were in font size 6. To sum it up: A significant number of applications and interfaces are needed to run a major bank…

The release of new software or new interfaces within the application architecture was performed in so called MDP’s (major deployment packages). At this time, such change of releases was planned three times a year. You may say that this is not exactly what you would call CI/CD – but that’s just how it was at this time…

To coordinate and manage and orchestrate such MDPs, a highly skilled, tough and well-informed person from management level was needed. That person – let’s call him Mr. Smith – would run the MDP meetings in a military kind of style in order to manage this “flea circus” of dependencies, priorities, special requests, regulatory requirements and business needs.

The MDP status meetings were somehow feared amongst the involved application managers, because nobody wanted to be the target of Mr. Smith’s critical questions and nobody wanted to be the person to endanger the MDP because he or she could not deliver his or her application until the defined deadline.

To read Part 2 of “A brief history of data quality or – the birth of OMrun”, click here.