Just remember folks, always, always do your requirements capture before buying a solution.
I built a mandate compliance system in the 1990s for AMP, Australia’s largest insurer and pension fund manager. I proposed 6 weeks of requirements gathering. They looked at me as if I were from outer space. I managed to convince them that before building a complex rule based system that was monitoring $20bn pension funds, it might be an idea to know the semantics of … you know, securities, portfolios, funds, risks etc. (Part of my motivation was that I had no clue of the formal definitions of these things myself, of course.)
They still looked at me weird but gave me 4 people. We built a live website of requirements material, based on interviews, and my very quick study of what the hell is a ‘security’ anywa
At roughly week 4, a manager from the portfolio management side came to me and said: Thomas, this is very interesting. We’ve just discovered that, due to all your interviews, that the portfolio side and the compliance side don’t agree on what a ‘portfolio’ is. And also, none of us is sure what the word ‘fund’ actually means. He gave me a somewhat threatening look, as if I had just torn up his peaceful rose garden.
To which I said (and BTW, these people were very sharp, many of them mathematicians): best we sort that out in the next two weeks, don’t you think? I mean, before pouring the concrete on a system that will control Rio Tinto’s pension fund. Him: you have my full support!
That requirements website became one of the most read resources for quite a while, giving everyone something to argue about over lunch. Turns out no-one explicitly knew what any of the semantic entities on which their jobs were based actually meant.
We built the system in about 12 months, and it ran like clockwork for 10 years.
Aside 1: the system used a simple version of archetypes, allowing securities to be modelled outside of software or DB.
Aside 2: one day, I asked where the actual traders were. I was offered a visit to their floor. We opened the door, and I was treated to a world of furious 3 screens per desk (this is the 1990s) activity, screaming and yelling that would curl the toenails of sailors of the Spanish Main. No women in sight. I looked at my colleague from our genteel tea drinking floor above and said, this isn’t human!
‘No, that’s why we keep them here. It’s all coffee, cocaine and fast cars.’
I asked: out of curiosity, do any women do this job?
‘A couple’.
‘Do they know what’s going to hit them here?’
‘Oh yes they know. Even better, the male traders have no idea… we’re talking lady pirates.’
One day, a colleague of mine in Sydney overheard, while travelling home from work, a conversation between two (it turned out) AMP managers on ‘what to do with the Mandate Compliance System, technologically out of date, but still doing what it was intended to do’. He told them he knew the builder of that system, and that we could renovate the existing system for a very good price.
We did so, and AMP got another 5 years out of the result.
They paid about $1.5m AUD total for the initial plus renovated solution. It managed the legal compliance of some hundreds of billions worth of pension funds for 15 years via computable rules built from legal documents, created with a visual editing tool, and executed in real time.
So. Do your requirements, or lose all your money. And don’t mess with lady pirates.