Canada: Royal Bank of Canada: linking various platforms

During the 1980s the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) had established itself among the top five banks in the world in almost every aspect of large scale retail banking. Its vast mainframe and WAN-based transaction processing operations covered 1,600 branches with high reliability and security. Many corporate customers chose RBC because of these capabilities. In addition to supporting large scale transaction processing, RBC had also invested heavily in automating its branches and providing teller workstations. By the early 1990s it basically had two platforms that did not communicate effectively, the PCs and LANs at the branches handled spreadsheets, word processing, data analysis and electronic mail. The mainframes processed transactions and accessed corporate databases.

To operate more effectively, RBC needed a way to link its entire IS infrastructure together. It adopted a phased migration plan to move gradually to a new internetworking architecture. It gradually started connecting to its backbone SNA network from LANs rather than network controllers. All the LANs had to be connected in a uniform way that permitted centralized network management across the LAN-WAN-LAN environment. Because downtime of even several hours would be very disruptive, RBC created a series of test environments before bringing major transaction processing systems on line. Even so, in 1991 an error in a funds transfer system interrupted processing of corporate customers payments. RBC's top officers of the bank had to cancel their scheduled work for two days to call customers to apologize. Eventually, the new architecture will increase access while reducing costs. It will eliminate hundreds of telephone lines and will increase transmission speeds by factors of hundreds.

Questions:

1. Use the WCA framework to organize your understanding of this case and to identify important topics that are not mentioned.

2. What issues (if any) make this case interesting from an international or intercultural viewpoint?

3. To what extent should RBC's top managers consider this highly technical effort strategic for the bank?

Source: Keen, Peter G. W., and J. Michael Cummings. Networks in Action. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1994, pp. 346-350.

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