In 2004 Deloitte faced many issues with their existing fat client audit software and decided it was time to implement a more enterprise wide solution to meet the geographically distributed needs of their business. The firm was not able to get information and guidelines to their auditors in a timely manner because it was a manual process. An enterprise system was designed to allow for real-time data exchange to and from the 40K+ auditors throughout the world. The new system would synchronize information between individual auditors with the global servers, as opposed to using CDs for information transfer. The system would now allow managers to view aggregate audit data from several auditors at once via dashboards.
The new system alleviated ongoing application maintenance issues that the firm was facing. Rather than having to distribute thousands of CDs, the auditors in the field were able to connect to the central servers and download the latest application software.
Internationalization requirements were easily met with the new system since all information that required localization were stored in centralized repositories and not hard coded within the client application. The information was able to be exported, translated by 3rd party consultants and the like, and then re-imported back into the system for synchronization with the auditor client applications.
This system required a distributed deployment environment across the globe. Each country, or region within a country, had their own centralized deployment. Each deployment was required to be available 24/7 so Microsoft clustering technologies were utilized to allow for active / active node clusters for the SQL server deployments. Clients connected to their regional application servers via a VPN connection, which then directed them, via a NLB (Network Load Balancer), to the application server farm.
We were also tasked with help bridge the gap between multiple teams both on premises and in Europe. This was one of the more exciting aspects of the project as we were able to build a true camaraderie with the European team where there were some issue previously.
The result of this product was a tool that allowed subject matter experts to author content that would streamline and simplify the audit process, increasing data capture validity, and decrease overall time spent on client engagements.
The application was built using win forms and accessed used a local SQL Server database. Background synchronization was used to bring down the latest content from a centralized SQL Server to the local client. Versioning needed to be taken into consideration so as to not break existing data relationships locally with new data from the server. The application was built using C#, XML, and ado.net for the data access.
Each regional / country deployment supported synchronization of 100K+ rows of data to 1K – 10K client users on a daily basis. Each regional / country deployment supported synchronization to central firm repositories for 1000K+ rows per week.