Background
City Power and Light is a large regional provider
of electrical services for residential and business customers.
The company has more than 500,000 residential customers. Every month, bills are
printed and mailed to these customers. Most of them pay their bills by mail.
However, a growing number of residential customers pay their bills by using
online payment services offered by their banks.
The company contracts you to create a Web site for customer bill payment and an
XML Web service for bill presentment. You will use the Microsoft .NET
Framework.
When the new bill presentment solution is implemented, banks will not store
monthly billing data for individual customers. Instead, banks will use a bill
payment application to obtain this data from the XML Web service.
Whenever a customer uses a bank’s online service to pay bills, the bank’s
application will query the XML Web service to provide the correct billing
amount.
Existing
IT Environment
An existing accounting application manages the
customer billing process for City Power and Lights, This application receives
electrical usage data for customers and then creates and prints monthly bills.
The accounting application runs on a mainframe computer that is located on the
corporate network. The mainframe computer has a TCP/IP interface that uses a
binary protocol. Communication over this interface is very slow.
Another existing application receives bank payments. This application enables
banks to submit electronic payments on behalf of their customers to City Power
and Light. The bank payment application is hosted on a network that is separate
from the corporate network. The hosting network and the corporate network are
connected by firewalls and a leased line.
Interviews
IT Department
IT Manager
If we expose any programmatic interfaces that are
externally accessible, they must be available only to authenticated users.
These interfaces must also use secure transport.
Our mainframe computer is operating a capacity. I do not want to add any new
applications or data to this computer.
Currently, we do not store authentication credentials for our customers.
However, all customers have unique account numbers. Customers will need to
create passwords and enter them when they use the new customer Web site to pay
bills.
I want the administration of the bill presentment solution to be as easy as
possible. We expect many banks to use this service. We already have
authentication credentials for most of the banks as part of our existing bank
payment application. These credentials are accessible from the bank payment
application through COM interfaces.
Business Stakeholders
Chief Executive Officer
Reliability is critical to our services. The new
solution must always be available both to our residential customers and to our
banking partners.
Security is also very important. Unauthorized users must not be able to view
billing data or bill presentment data that relates to our customers.
Some bank plan to discontinue electronic payment for our bills unless we offer
a bill presentment data that relates to our customers.
Some banks plan to discontinue electronic payment for our bills unless we offer
a bill presentment service. We want to ensure that these banks continue to
offer electronic payment for our bills.
Finance Department
Chief Financial Officer
We want to reduce the costs involved in handling
paper bills. We want as many of our residential customers as possible to pay
their bills electronically.
Currently, some of our customers use bill payment services offered by their
banks. However, the banks have no way to obtain billing data from us.
Therefore, customers need to enter each bill amount in the bill payment
application. Customer entry results in frequent billing errors and in
dissatisfied customers.
We need a bill presentment application to solve this problem. This application
will enable banks to query our computers for detailed billing data for each
customer. It will also enable us to control the appearance and branding of
bills that are electronically presented to our customers.
In addition, we need a customer Web site to enable our customers to view and
pay their monthly bills. Some of our customers do not have access to bill
payment services offered by a bank. We want to enable each customer to pay
bills by using one or more credit cards. Some customers prefer to pay bills
manually each month by credit card. Other customers prefer to schedule an
automatic monthly payment by credit card. We must support both preferences.
Business
Process
Residential customer bills can be due on ten
different dates during the month. Each customer is assigned to one of the ten
dates. The existing accounting application stores the due date for each
customer.
Meter reader employees read electrical usage meters for residential customers.
However, each meter is read only four times a year. Therefore, most monthly
bill amounts are estimates. Each bill amount is generated 30 days before the
bill is due. Bill amounts are adjusted to balance actual estimated usage. The
existing interface for the accounting application can provide data only for the
current billing cycle.