IT2 workbenches and process maps

SimCorp Swallow Business Systems Ltd (Formerly Bank of America)
Full Time Employee April 1998 - June 2004
Senior System Development Consultant

Technologies: VS 6, VS 2003, C, C++, STL, MFC, COM, ADO, Win32, SQL, SQL Server Db Library, VSS

At SimCorp (formerly Bank of America), the then Head of Development, Lee Wright, asked me to re-architect the user interface of the company's flagship treasury management product, IT2. What resulted was a paradigm shift in the way people interacted with IT2. The changes that I put in place contributed significantly to increased sales of IT2 and brought about a more agile development environment.

My work involved converting much of the code base from C to C++, separating business logic from presentation logic and replacing the old dialog based user interface with a new multi-threaded "Outlook-style" grid driven user interface. The grid controls that I designed and coded support multiple levels of sorting, grouping and filtering as well as real time update.

The grid controls became known as workbenches and once this initiative was complete, I was tasked with implementing a new feature called process maps that would simplify even further the way people interracted with IT2. Process maps are interactive flowcharts that guide users through complex treasury tasks.

Workbenches and process maps are now ubiquitous in IT2 and remain one of the product's key selling points.

Here are a few screenshots of workbenches and process maps as they appeared in IT2 version 5.2, circa 2004:

Deals workbench. Shows deals input today grouped by deal type. Clicking on a deal (SDP3977 in the example above), shows related instructions, flows and account entries in child panes. Grids update in real time as new deals are entered or existing deals are updated or deleted.

User administration process map. Clicking the process map icon User Audit (99) (found in the top right hand corner of the screenshot) launches the user audit workbench (shown in the bottom half of the screenshot). When a process map item launches a workbench, the number in brackets (in this case 99) indicates the number of rows that are contained in the linked workbench. All data (process map counts, workbench grids) update in real time.

Process map administration. This screenshot shows the user interface for managing process maps. In this example, a process map for straight through processing (STP) is being created.