Unlock document.
This document is partially blurred.
Unlock all pages and 1 million more documents.
Get Access
The annuities department was faced with an accounting problem. The current accounting
system would be obsolete in a few years and our business customers are currently
experiencing resource issues when problems arise and support for this system is required.
Since financial reporting is a complex process, convoluted action was required to resolve
this problem. The annuity technology group, along with the annuity business group came
up with three possible solutions and conducted a high level requirements analysis and a
cost benefit analysis to determine which solution to implement. The solutions analyzed
were, do nothing and stay on the existing accounting system, go with a new accounting
system designed and built by our Life Insurance partners, or build our own accounting
engine.
The requirements and cost benefit analysis took several months to complete and a final
decision would not be made until 18 months after the initiation of this project. The end
result of the requirements and cost benefit analysis concluded that it was most beneficial to
our business partners to build our own accounting engine; however this was not the elected
solution.
Our suggestion to do nothing was not feasible; we were already facing resource issues for
existing accounting problems. Additionally, through requirements analysis, we discovered
that no future enhancements would be made to this old system, as the annuity business unit
was the sole user of this system. Early on, we were able to eliminate remaining with our
existing accounting system as a reasonable solution.
External pressure from our Life Insurance partners wanted us to commit to using their
services. Life Insurance had designed and implemented an accounting system a few years
ago that provided wonderful functionality. This system is being used by most of the
enterprise although there is no corporate mandate requiring administration areas to use it.
While the functionality of this system is quite detailed and impressive, it fails to meet all of
the needs of the annuity business customers. Because the annuity business requirements
were quite extensive, the life insurance group could not commit to the necessary
enhancements that would be required to their system to satisfy annuity users. Because of
these business requirements, we then conducted an extensive analysis to determine what
Annuities IT could do to satisfy the business requirements. The analysis revealed that we
could build our own accounting system for only 25% of the cost of using the life insurance
system.
With clearly documented analysis, many on the development team thought that the annuity
