| gemEnterprise™
Providing Common Business Services for Lotteries
Situation Analysis
Lotteries are large-scale enterprises, comparable in revenue to some of the
biggest private organizations in business today. Like most big businesses,
Lotteries rely on a collection of IT systems to effectively manage their
business processes. In addition to the highly technical product delivery
channels such as POS networks and on-line gaming servers, Lotteries employ
less visible systems tasked with managing many of the essential business
functions required by a modern Lottery. Commonly referred to as "back office"
systems, most of these Lottery IT systems have evolved in an ad-hoc manner as
either in-house systems, or as part of systems provided by gaming vendors. In
many implementations, some limited back office functions are provided by on-line
systems, but on-line systems generally are not designed to support the actual
business requirements of a Lottery. In recognizing the strategic importance of
these business functions to the future business requirements of the enterprise,
it is essential for Lotteries to re-evaluate their long-term technology plans.
In order to assist in that process, we offer some of the findings and issues we
have encountered as a result of research of current Lottery technology:
Ownership. Information is one of the biggest assets of an organization. When
Lotteries rely on external vendors to manage and maintain critical information
about its products and clients, serious consequences arise when there is a change
in relationship with these vendors. An example is the entire history of the retailer
base.
Independence. With the advances in technology and systems available for various
facets of the Lottery business, many modern day Lotteries have become so dependent
on technology provided by their existing gaming vendors that they are unable to
benefit from these new systems.
Control. When multiple systems and vendors provide the sum of the
products and services offered by a Lottery, it is essential that all the systems
act in unison and be managed in an integrated manner. This is unfortunately not the
situation in many cases today. For example, an on-line and instant system may both
have retailer management functions that were developed in isolation by different vendors.
When these systems are deployed in concert, the issue of "who is in charge?" invariably
crops up.
The Technology requirements of Lotteries have become more complex as Lotteries
try and satisfy requests for integrated services and information. In many cases Lotteries
have resorted to using various methods such as in-house databases, spreadsheets, custom
files or a combination of methods to satisfy their needs. Some of the technology used has
become outdated, making it harder and more expensive to maintain and to add new functionality.
"We do not have access to up-to-date financial information.
The information provided by our on-line vendor is mostly in an off-line manner"
"Our ability to bring new games to the market has been greatly affected by the
complexity of our on-line gaming system, since we also want to offer the same games
on other sales channels"
"The process of changing our on-line vendor will be a near impossible task -
most of our current systems today are provided by our (on-line) vendor"
The Lapis Solution
During the course of ongoing research into the future direction
of Lottery technology, Lapis has identified several key areas where
current solutions are rapidly becoming inadequate to cope with the
changing demands of the industry. Foremost amongst these is the area
of Lottery business automation systems, often collectively referred
to as "back office systems".
As a result of our research, we have identified a set of Common
Lottery Business Services that are required by Lotteries, regardless
of their product mix or distribution channels. Based on the requirements
for these services, we have defined a product family called gemEnterprise™
that provides these services in a gaming system independent manner.
The architecture uses standards based technology and is designed in a
modular fashion. All system interfaces are published and are implemented
using industry standard protocols. This approach allows Lottery organizations
to deploy flexible subsets of gemEnterprise™ while continuing to leverage
their existing investment in back office technology.
The goal of gemEnterprise™ is to offer Lotteries greatly enhanced flexibility,
control, and most importantly, ownership of their essential business information.
The gemEnterprise™ solution is available as a set of mutually compatible
modules.
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