>    Case Study

Direct Business Intelligence Ltd - By Derek Essen
Finance Director

"Get our sales lead system on to the web within four weeks and we'll give you our world wide business…"

A fully functional business to business web site from scratch in four weeks. It was a tall order but there again, we can never resist a challenge.

Direct Business Intelligence Ltd (DBI), a sales lead processing and fulfilment company and Europe's premier database marketing company had a major client in a real hurry.

“We want you to get the system of sales leads you process for us up and running on a website so our sales associates worldwide can use the system. What’s more we want it done IMMEDIATELY. If you can achieve it in four weeks, then we’ll give you our worldwide business.”

Information Systems had already been working with DBI for some time on internal computer systems, and so understood DBI’s business. We were the obvious choice for DBI’s requirement. But could we do it? A fully functional business to business web site from scratch in four weeks? I felt unable to give a firm undertaking that we'd deliver within the four weeks. But I said we'd do our damnedest. And on that basis the project went ahead.

Two of Information Systems lead developers worked with a DBI analyst to firm up on the requirements and agree screen layouts and a data design. While one developer worked on user interface screens, the other created the database stored procedures to deliver the information. As sections of the System were written, the DBI analyst tested them immediately, and an iterative process of simultaneous development and testing was embarked on. This ensured that quality control was maintained at the highest level despite the extremely tight timescales.

Three and a half weeks later the site was up and running and demonstrated to DBI’s client in Europe, with a follow-on presentation in USA three days later.

Delighted with the system, DBI’s client was as good as their word and awarded DBI the world wide business as promised.

The key ingredients for success were:
• Rapid agreement of a full and complete set of business and technical objectives for the project at its outset
• A tight working partnership between Information Systems and DBI
• Commitment to the business objective by both parties
• A delivery and results oriented approach
• Ability of Information Systems to edit and fast track its normal development process without loss of quality

Technical commentary

A three tier solution was used consisting of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 for the database layer, a Visual Basic COM component for the Business Logic layer and Internet Explorer 5.5 for delivery on the client. Web pages were fed to the client by Microsoft ASP pages on the web server. The business logic encapsulated in the COM component was used to invoke stored procedures on the SQL Server database. Delivery from the COM component to the Microsoft ASP pages was achieved using XML, and then extensible style sheets (XSL) were used to transform the data into HTML for delivery of the web page to the Internet Explorer client.