Barclays bank approach to system implementation ((business information system)) - Essay Example

This would mean spending more money to pay the extra manpower added to run the two systems together. With the case for Barclays, this cost was minimized when they decided to use the ‘big bang’ approach where by they only spent on the new system rather that both the new and the old as in parallel or pilot approaches of system implementation. During the process of migrating old data to the new IBM database DB2, erroneous data that were found in the old databases were removed and only complete and useful data was moved.

This helped the bank on saving disk space and also in the cleaning of their data. When running only one system the concentration level of the staff using the system becomes high because they only need to focus on one system rather than two. This method of changeover reduces interruptions caused when the staffs have to work on two systems concurrently. Therefore, Barclay staff had minimum interruption considered to when the bank had decided to use a parallel method. Since the staffs using the new system don’t have a fallback system, they tend to learn how to use the new system faster than when the organization was running on a parallel system changeover approach.

Regardless of preparing for the last 18 months for the launch of the new system, no one knows when things might go wrong. By adopting the ‘big bang’ approach, the bank had risked losing both the old system and the new one just in case it failed. The impact of such failure would also be more than when other methods were used. There is always the risk of meeting the deadline of launching the new system especially when a team is involved in the development process. For the case of Barclays, they never had problem in meeting their deadline and things went smooth.

Merging data from various databases into one centrally located and accessible by all branches was a difficult task. This was so because, some of the data had to