U. S. Bancorp's tool for the project is U.S. Bank's desktop and server change- and configuration-management package, which also will let the growing bank push updates more quickly to its users and better track its software inventory.

Uniting Firstar's and U.S. Bank's 28,000 corporate workstations and 5,000 corporate servers to NT Workstation and NT Server will come later, likely in late 2003. The plan is ultimately to migrate to Windows 2000 for both retail and corporate desktops and servers.

The integration project hasn't been easy, though "in every merger, integrating the desktop technologies isn't as tricky as blending the corporate cultures," says Valerie Couch, manager of software distribution for U.S. Bancorp, Minneapolis, the parent company of U.S. Bank and Firstar Bank.

Before the merger, only the retail banking side of U.S. Bancorp had centralized desktop configuration, while each corporate business line handled its own desktops. At Firstar, the business units have traditionally driven technology, so desktop configuration and application deployment were decentralized there, too.

The result was application chaos after the merger. "Anytime you are trying to support 10 different versions of a piece of software, you're going to run into problems," Couch says.

So U.S. Bancorp is putting software distribution and configuration management for the entire bank into the hands of its IT department. "You don't want business units driving all the technology -- you want IT to do that," Couch says.

The bank is running LAN Supervision's (LSVi) Change Management Facility (CMF) application for the desktop and server integration effort on the retail side. That helps push the bank's desktop and server images out to users. "We're going to have standardized server and workstation images across all our retail banks," Couch says. This encompasses 2,400 banks and 35,000 users, she adds.

A scheduler program within the CMF pushes the desktop and server applications after-hours over U.S. Bancorp's WAN connection. "CMF uses an unattended installation method, so no one needs to be there to log on the workstations," Couch says.

As for changes to desktop and server management on the corporate side, the aftermath of the Nimda virus affected the organization's approach. The bank needed to distribute browser and antivirus updates to its desktops and servers after the virus outbreak, even though they weren't hit. Couch and her team used the CMF tool on the retail side of the house and updated 16,000 users in 1,200 sites in less than five days -- a task that took the corporate side of the bank several weeks to do with its distributed approach. Couch says the contrast convinced management to adopt the more efficient centralized architecture.

Because the change-management application is mainframe-based, it doesn't include a slick GUI. "It's not pretty, but it's robust and consistent," Couch says. The missing link is the software's lack of a remote-management feature for the workstations and servers. "We can go to the server and pull logs, directories and lists of files, but we need to use a secondary tool for remote control," Couch says.