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Andrew Rafalaf
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Liberty Streamlines Management of Web Site

Liberty Financial has partnered with Context Integration to streamline the integration between its legacy and Internet systems.

Woe is the life of the large and successful mutual fund firm. First, it has all those assets to manage, $60 billion in the case of Liberty Financial. Then, as it has diversified and merged with other entities, the firm needs to streamline the operations of its various subsidiaries to realize cost efficiencies. If that wasn't enough, these mutual funds now have to contend with tying together the technology and management of various Web sites that have sprouted up during the chaotic emergence of the Internet.

Liberty Financial has come in recent months to realize the difficulties of managing the Web sites of its many divisions. The firm wanted to lend its groups freedom to update the content of the sites while holding them to the same platforms and data structures.

The asset management company has partnered with Context Integration (CI), a Web solutions integrator, to streamline the integration between its legacy and Internet systems, and upgrade the speed and efficiency of the personalization tools available on the company's numerous sites. A large part of the project will focus on upgrading the various sites of Liberty's four money management divisions from BroadVision 3.0 to 4.1, a suite of one-to-one relationship management Internet applications, in an effort to reduce the various complexities now inherent in updating the Web sites.

"Our sites haven't been performing up to the standards we want," explains Jeremy Jaffe, Liberty's v.p. of electronic commerce. "Our whole development environment and the speed it was being delivered is not what we wanted."

Version 3 of BroadVision employs a large number of static templates, as well as business rules imbedded in C++ objects. CI, which has an extensive history working with BroadVision, has been tapped to port all the relevant data and rules from version 3 to 4.1 to simplify site management and serve clients with personalized pages, says Michael Hernon, senior consultant at Context Integration.

For one, BroadVision 4.1 removes the rules imbedded in the C++ objects and places them in an object library. Using the scripting language JavaScript, one only needs to make a change in the library, without rearchitecting each particular page, and pages that are connected with that new rule will be updated automatically.

"When you have rules imbedded in C++ objects, every time you want to change a rule, you need the developer to go modify the code, recompile the code, test it, and then send it along to the production environment," Hernon says. "With 4.1, you can have a business analyst with a BroadVision tool, called Dynamic Command Center, and he can change that rule on the fly ... If the page is coded in JavaScript, the page will know the changes and update them."

CI is also removing some of the database dependencies between the four Liberty divisions-Stein Roe Funds, Liberty Funds, Keyport Life Insurance Co. and Independent Financial Marketing Group (IFMG)-so that each division can promote content independently of one another. As it stands now, each must confer with the other about a site alteration. A process that should take a day ends up taking a week.

"Between our four subsidiaries working with BroadVision 3.0, and about nine different sites, we have had coordination issues," Jaffe points out.

Part of improving the delivery to the customer will be to more tightly integrate the legacy systems with the Web front-end via CORBA which comes with BroadVision 4.1. A client or a dealer currently has account access on the Stein Roe site, but Hernon insists this will speed up the downloading of content. The CORBA implementation will add account look-up to the Liberty Funds site.

Liberty is also moving its application hosting from IDD to USI. Over time, IDD's focus has shifted from application hosting to newsfeeds, and Jaffe and Hernon believe that USI will be able to dedicate more resources to the maintenance of the Liberty sites.

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