CIS 445: DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Bank Case

Data Management at the Conventional National Bank

The Conventional National Bank (CNB) acquired a computer in the mid-1960s to automate check processing.  The bank soon realized that the computer was useful for many other purposes, such as maintaining information on mortgage loans, auto loans, savings accounts, and portfolios of common stocks, bonds, and other securities.  During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the bank converted these applications from manual to computer-based systems.  Most of the software to support these applications was written in COBOL.  By the mid-1970s, thousands of COBOL programs were in use.  Some of these programs were enormous--several thousand lines long.  Together, all the programs comprised well over a million lines of COBOL code.

     The bank is organized on the basis of the functions it performs:  There are departments for checking accounts, savings accounts, auto loans, mortgage loans, trusts, and so on.  To reduce the need for interdepartmental communication, separate data files are maintained for each department.  Because the bank has several thousand customers, and most customers have several accounts, these files now occupy several billion characters of disk storage.

     Tia Fuentes has been a regular customer of CNB for 15 years.  Tia began her association with the bank when she graduated form college and moved to Conventional city to begin a position as manager trainee for Silver Flatware Products.  Over the years, Tia has accumulated some savings which she keeps in a passbook savings account with the bank.  Two years ago, and purchased a new car with a loan she got at CNB.  Three months ago, Tia was promoted to assistant manager, and shortly thereafter she moved into a new home.  Tia now resides comfortable in her new estate near the flatware plant.

     After an important staff meeting one day, Tia returned to her office to find a telephone message from Gilda Kerr, an auto loan officer at CNB.  Tia returned the call only to discover that Gilda was calling to ask why Tia had not made car payments for the past three months. After all, CNB had sent the usual computer-prepared reminder each month with a preprinted return envelope for her convenience.

     Tia was stunned!  In the excitement of her promotion and move, she had completely forgotten about the car payment.  She had called the bank to give them her new address, and she had received her monthly bank statements and notices on the mortgage loan payments.  She had not received any notices on the car payments, and they had completely slipped her mind. Gilda knew Tia to be honest and reliable, so she said she would look into the matter.

     The manager of information services (IS), Henry Lew, showed Gilda some diagrams (Figure 1--4) and explained that all the departmental files had originally been set up independently and that IS got updates for departmental files from the departments themselves.  IS was not at fault because they did not get a notice to change Tia's address from the auto loan department.

     Gilda asked why one update form did not suffice, since the system could use the data from that form to change all occurrences of the address.  Henry explained that no one in IS had any way of knowing if a person's name and address were in a file.  A program could be written to search all the files, but it would be extremely inefficient because so many files would have to be examined.

     Gilda wondered aloud why CNB could not just have one file of names and addresses that was shared by all the departments in the bank.  Henry replied that they could, but then all the existing programs using names and addresses would have to be changed, and IS did not really even know all the programs that used that data.  Just tracking known those programs and the programmers who wrote them (if they were still at CNB) would be a big job.

     In desperation, Gilda asked if IS could not at least find each name occurring in more than one file and then compare the addresses to see if they were consistent in all files.  Henry said that IS would be glad to do that, but that it would take a special program.  IS was already overloaded with a waiting list of two year's worth of programming.  With luck, however, they might be able to develop the program in 18 months.

     Gilda was flabbergasted!  How could it take 18 to 24 months to produce something as simple as a list of people whose names and addresses appeared in more than one place in the computer system?  She left the data processing department more discouraged than ever about computers.  Why should the bank waste time putting data into the computer system when it took forever to get it out in a usable form and even then was wrong half the time?

FIGURE 1--4 Conventional National Bank Departmental Master File Formats

Checking Account Master File Format  

Acct #

Last name

First name

Middle name

SS #

Checking acct. data

Savings Account Master File Format                                                                                      

Acct #

Last name

First name

Middle name

SS #

Savings acct. data

Auto Loan Master File Format

Acct #

Last name

First name

Middle name

SS #

Auto loan data

Personal Loan master File Format

Acct #

Last name

First name

Middle name

SS #

Personal loan data

Courtney, Jr., James F., Paradice, David B.
Database Systems For Management, 2nd ed.
Case: Data Management at the Conventional National Bank
Chapter 1, p.14
Publisher: Irwin.

Last edited by Tommie Singleton on September 2, 1997