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Until recently, Kurt Lange, a senior vice president at Fidelity Investments, Inc. in Boston, supervised a group responsible for producing a critical 45-page printed report on the firm's financial health. Every week, at least 10 employees devoted up to several days gathering data, merging spreadsheets and relying on "Sneakernet" to pull together the report for the senior financial staff.
Since adopting a Windows-based executive information system (EIS), however, Lange's employees don't have to do all that footwork anymore. Currently on rollout to its first 100 users, the custom-built EIS is changing the way Fidelity's executives access vital operational data. Instead of pasting together the report from diverse databases, analysts and managers access data on-line via networked personal computers.
Fidelity has long prided itself on its commitment to investing in technology. The privately held financial services and mutual funds giant, which manages more than $165 billion in customer accounts, annually plows an estimated $150 million into the information systems group. Of a total staff of about 8,000, some 850 people work in IS.
As early as 1988, the IS group began developing Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 2.0 applications to streamline the work of customer service representatives. The goal was to turn the PC into an easy-to-use intelligent workstation with the ability to manipulate data in different windows.
Today, phone representatives are equipped with Windows workstations that allow them to quickly access diverse databases and systems, including stock quotes, newspaper stories and customer records.
MAKING A BOLD MOVE
With the customer service department computerized under Windows, the company decided to venture one step further. A 12-week efficiency study by Coopers & Lybrand determined that day-to-day operational information was too centralized and too difficult to obtain. That's when Bill Niemi, Fidelity's director of distributed systems development, began to build a Windows-based EIS. The goal: to bring relevant data to financial executives with a few keystrokes.
"Fidelity is broken up...