Information Technology Projects
Spring 99 Proposals
Update history: 12/30/98, 1/18/99
Prof. Arthur Goldberg
Computer Science Department
Courant Institute of Mathematics
New York University
Bristol-Myers Squibb Company
Description of company or organization
Bristol-Myers Squibb Company is an $18 billion leading diversified worldwide
health and personal care company. Our principal businesses are pharmaceuticals,
consumer medicines, beauty care, nutritionals, and medical devices. Our
mission is to develop and market innovative products that extend and enhance
human life.
Constituting a diverse and skilled workforce of nearly 55,000 dedicated
men and women, Bristol-Myers Squibb employees can be found in more than
60 countries around the globe.
Proposal
Bristol-Myers Squibb has a number of innovative technology projects capitalizing
on the power of the Web, both internally and externally, to enhance revenue,
communication, and productivity.
However, we feel there are significant additional opportunities to use
E-Business to meet our corporate goals – in the areas of sales and marketing,
supply chain, education, customer and shareholder relations.
This project would involve the following deliverables:
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Understanding the products, customers, and distribution channels of Bristol-Myers
Squibb
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Benchmarking how other companies with similar products and distribution
channels are using E-Business
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Identification of additional opportunities to use E-Business to further
the goals of Bristol-Myers Squibb, including the expected cost/benefit,
barriers to entry, and expected timeframes
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Development of prototypes of selected opportunities
To achieve these deliverables, we would expect the team to interview internal
BMS employees, as well as conduct external interviews with companies that
have successfully deployed E-Business solutions.
The address where students would intern
345 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10154
Company Web site
www.bms.com
Authorizing manager
Denise L. Allec
Director
Information Management
546-3908
DAllec@USCCMAIL.bms.com
Phil Spotsey
546-3387
Senior Analyst
PSpotsey@USCCMAIL.bms.com
Project manager
Pat Marafiote
Associate Director
Technical Development
546-3232
PMarafio@USCCMAIL.bms.com
Resources that will be made available to students
Computers at Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Corporate Staff’s Information Management
department.
Chase Manhattan Bank
Global Information Systems and Technology: GBOT/GIST is an applications
development group designed to support the Global Bank and Middle Market
Banking. The department provides line of business information technology
solutions as well as cross-organizational systems development services.
The Portfolio Review Services team is responsible to design and develop
Content /Document Management technology to support the annual credit review
process in Global Bank. This process enables all significant Global
customers to be evaluated in the context of their industry and peer companies.
There are 50 industry reviews conducted (soon to be 90). Lenders
and analysts prepare internal and external documentation for each industry
and each company to be reviewed.
The technology is client/server, multi-tiered, and componentized to
maximize sharing and integration. It includes Windows and Web
development to be deployed at the client workstation, and server-based
business functionality to be deployed at intermediate and mainframe platform
application servers and relational databases.
Proposal
Specify, architect and partly prototype a generic, adaptable, and flexible
knowledge management (KM) reporting architecture which integrates multiple
backend repositories, and can be accessed via varied client front-ends.
The KM reporting architecture (KMRA) will access both structured (i.e.
SQL RDBMS) and unstructured (Domino, and document repository such as Documentum
and Domino attachments) data. For example, a search through the KMRA
might access a RDBMS index, a pre-tagged document index and a verity search
engine.
The clients will include browsers, programs, such as Web servers, and,
possibly, other desktop applications.
This system will interact with Chase's global messaging standard, which
supports synchronous and asynchronous messaging. A CORBA compliant
system, Iona's Orbix buss, provides the synchronous messaging framework,
whereas IBM's MQ series provides the asynchronous messaging.
The KMRA will be described as a protocol with message semantics, and
a meta-data model.
If time allows, we'll talk to some other companies to learn how they
integrate data, and benchmark their systems against our own ideas.
For example, Mondex, a Chase spin-off, could describe how they integrate
feeds.
The prototype's scope will be limited to one area within Chase, probably
portfolio management, which is Bob area of expertise and responsibility.
The address where students will intern
140 East 45th Street, 31st Floor
Company Web site
www.chase.com
Authorizing managers
John McFadden
JOHN.MCFADDEN@chase.com
Senior Vice President
Global Information Systems and Technology
Rob Barocas
ROB.BAROCAS@chase.com
638-0730
Project manager
David Ditillo
david.ditillo@chase.com
212 638-5774
Resources that will be made available to students
Computing at Chase. Chase's business information Center and research
librarians.
NYU Stern School of Business
The Stern School of Business is a major US business school
offering BS, MBA, MS and Ph.D. degrees. It has become increasingly reliant
on technology to accomplish its teaching and research agenda. The growth
of the WEB has made it mandatory that virtually all interactions of users
of Stern systems be via the WEB
Proposal
The Stern School has a wide variety of databases that it uses to track
prospects, applicants, students, alumni, faculty, recruiters, donors etc.
Unfortunately, currently the data is distributed across several different
database platforms (Ingres, SQL Server, MS Access etc.) as well as central
university systems. We are looking for a MS-IS team to review the current
data and investigate the feasibility of an integrated, Web-enabled centralized
Oracle Database that would provide a facility for developing a set of administrative
systems that would allow the tracking of a student from the time that they
first apply for application materials through the rest of their time at
Stern and beyond. There are several different steps that we envision.
1) The development of a comprehensive Entity-Relationship diagram of
the desired system, using existing data definitions as the starting point.
2) A prototype, Web-enabled database schema derived from the E-R diagrams,
for part of the data.
3) Recommendations on how to make the transition to the new database.
4) A review of the tradeoffs of different methodologies for building
the web processing components of the system.
5) A sample implementation of some portion of the system (preferably
a function which is not currently available over the WEB)
The address where students would intern
44 West 4th Street
Company Web site
WWW.STERN.NYU.EDU
Authorizing manager
Avijit Ghosh, Executive Vice Dean
Project manager
Norman White, Acting Chief Technology Advisor, 998-0842
nwhite@stern.nyu.edu
Resources that will be made available to students
WEB Enabled Oracle database, Sun Solaris workstation, Computer Accounts,
Documentation of existing systems, Interviews with key users
Salomon Smith Barney, Inc.
Description of company or organization
Electronic Commerce Department has developed and implemented a series of
the Internet based communication tools to assist Fixed Income Departments
of the company with better interaction with their customers. It is actively
evaluating as well as employing various technological innovations in the
Internet Technology.
Proposal
"Developing FIML - Fixed Income Markup Language"
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Goals:
This project would involve learning the concepts of Fixed Income data
structure within Salomon Smith Barney as well as the emerging XML technology.
Creating a common Document Type Declaration (DTD) would address the
problem of data sharing. Currently, there is no standard form of
Fixed Income data communication.
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Overview:
Fixed Income is divided into various markets such as Governments, Agency,
Corporate, Mortgages, High Yield, etc. The differences in origin, content,
and target of the data makes it hard to align it under the same set of
rules. The new XML specification gives us an opportunity to attempt to
structure the Fixed Income Data into one standard which would allow many
companies to interchange such data more effectively, reducing the cost
associated with design and development efforts that currently accommodate
proprietary data protocols and conversion algorithms.
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Proposed task list:
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Gather Fixed Income data definitions and concepts for the majority of the
markets
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Study DTD specification and come up with a language describing the rules
and methods of a standard for creating XML documents for Fixed Income data.
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Employ one of the publicly available XML/XSL parsers to demonstrate the
power of XML representation of the data.
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Prepare a paper describing the research process, the results, and the benefits
of using XML/XSL model for data representation and interchange.
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Issues and the scope of the project:
This project would not attempt to cover all existing types and variations
of Fixed Income data forms and products. It would concentrate on covering
the most common data types, particularly ones which are currently processed
and used by Salomon Smith Barney. The standard would need to be easily
extendible to broad and deepen its coverage. The success of current effort
will determine the future direction of this project. The DTD might be proposed
standard for the Financial Industry, while inviting other major firms to
contribute their information and share their knowledge in the effort to
create a truly standard protocol for data exchange.
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Resources:
The address where students would intern
7 World Trade Center or 390 Greenich Ave
Company Web site
www.salomonsmithbarney.com
Authorizing manager
Steven Lefler, (212)783-7683, steven.d.lefler@ssmb.com
Project manager
Sergey Shinkar, (212) 783-1859, sergey.y.shinkar@ssmb.com
Resources that will be made available to students
TBD