Commonwealth Bank - Customer Case Study

CBA is one of Australia's largest banks, and it employs thousands of people Australia wide. SSW developed an intranet based ASP.NET solution to help them better manage their staffing timesheets and allow HR to better track employee performance and work expectations. The project was written in .NET with a MS SQL Server backend. It was written in a combination of both VB.NET (for the front-end plus security) and C# (for data access and business logic). The website needed to be very rich in terms of the client interaction, it was originally slated as a Windows Forms project but for various reasons it ended up being web based. This meant that large effort was put into developing and using rich controls with considerable client-side functionality. An interesting challenge of this project involved the security implementation, whereby the system had to not only allow integrated (Windows) if possible to allow users to be identified without needing to enter a sign in prompt, but it also had to share its authentication and authorization logic with any number of external applications. This means that the authentication and authorization process talks to up to 3 different web services in order to log a user in. Implementing the database schema also threw up a number of challenges including an interesting modeling of the organizational hierarchy and our ability to efficiently query parent-child and parent-descendent relationships within the self-referencing data. The CommTrack application is now expected to serve some thousands of internal users throughout their day and feed into a greater data warehouse to enable advanced management reporting. It is a massive improvement over an existing system of manual spreadsheet maintenance. When the full rollout is complete, CommTrack is expected to give CBA investment returns in the range hundreds of thousands of dollars per year through increased staff productivity and process improvements.