New Redbook on the uses of events and Web 2.0 technologies

alisonlucas — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:23:29 +0000

If you’re interested in the new features of CICS TS V4.1, and are looking for examples of their use in real life scenarios, then you might be interested in a new Redbook we’re writing in sunny Montpellier. Its title is “Smarter Banking with CICS” (probably). While it is aimed primarily at the banking industry, it will include example uses of events and Web 2.0 technologies with CICS to show how these could be used within an existing CICS system. Watch this space for more information (or follow its progress on Twitter).

To whet your appetite, here’s what will probably be the preface:

It goes without saying that 2009 was a year of unprecedented change in global banking. The challenges that financial institutions are facing require them to cut costs, but also to regain trust and improve the service that they provide to an increasingly sophisticated and demanding set of customers.

In the past, siloed and rigid IT systems have often inhibited banks in their attempts to re-engineer their business processes. IBM’s Smarter Banking initiative highlights how more intelligent software can be used to significantly improve the end-to-end integration of banking processes.

This IBM Redbook aims to show how software technologies like SOA, Web 2.0 and event driven architectures, can be used to implement Smarter Banking solutions. Our focus is on CICS Transaction Server which is at the heart of most bank’s corebanking implementations.

The first part of the Redbook is aimed at business leaders, it introduces Smarter Banking, provides an overview the IBM Banking Industry Framework, and then illustrates the value proposition with a set of Smarter Banking business scenarios.

In the second part of the book we address the bank’s technical leaders by providing an overview of the key technologies and describing how CICS supports these technologies today.
IBM’s SmartBank showcase is used in the final part of the book to illustrate how we enabled business event processing and Web 2.0 technologies in the SmartBank environment, in a non-invasive way without changes to the applications.

We show how we enabled the CICS corebanking system to emit events for large transactions. We also show how these events are consumed by WebSphere Business Events which is configured to take a pre-defined action when a certain pattern of events occurs.

We also show how the CICS corebanking data, such as account transaction information, can be exposed as a mashable Web 2.0 feed so that the account holder has instant access to the recent transaction history.

It is hoped that this IBM Redbook will help you to take the first steps toward Smarter Banking with CICS.

The Master Terminal » alisonlucas

New Redbook on the uses of events and Web 2.0 technologies