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returns. The development of this project followed the SDM,
including extensive testing on a separate test bed.
Yet another project, the Micro IS system, which was vendor
supplied, was designed to automate purchases and sales of
investment securities. This portfolio management system permitted
a "what-if" analysis whereby the user could examine the impact of
hypothetical purchases and sales. When Micro IS was purchased, it
was written in Lotus (a spreadsheet program). The processing time,
as much as 5 minutes, was unacceptable to NTS. Consequently, NTS
suggested to the vendor that the application be written in a
"higher" language, such as C, to increase the efficiency of the
system. The vendor accepted the suggestion and rewrote the
application for Norwest. The result, after an iterative testing
process by Norwest taking approximately 6 to 9 months, was the
reduction in response time to less than 5 seconds.
The Micro IS system required two other notable changes. One
was to increase the speed by which data could be extracted from the
mainframe computer (which updated the data the night before) and
sent to the Micro IS system. The trust portfolio data had to be
extracted and loaded on to the Micro IS system from the mainframe
each morning by 7 a.m., at which time portfolio managers arrived at
work. As a result of this time constraint, the vendor had to
rewrite a portion of the system in the C language. Norwest
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