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.