Application management services: collaboration in branch banking

The concept of collaboration between employees in branch banking as facilitated by various software methods is intended to reduce problems with training, turnover, and level of experience encountered with branch bank employees. The authors demonstrate how these problems were reduced by online collaboration between bank branch employees through the use of facilities provided by the NCR Application Management Services (AMS) product. This concept of collaboration is presented, along with technical problems experienced and overcome during the course of development. The collaborative features of AMS allow an experienced supervisor to solve problems encountered by new users and less experienced users without having to leave his or her desktop computer. The supervisor may be located in the same LAN workgroup or may have access to the workgroup through a telecommunications link. The six features that support collaboration within the bank branches are described. AMS is based on a client/server architecture in which the clients are Windows or MS-DOS based workstations and the server is a UNIX or OS/2 based system providing a communication gateway and database services as well as file and print services.<>