Back end data processing is the heart and soul of the IT world.  Most people don't think about how much data processing goes on "behind the scenes" to make most operations go on a day to day basis.

One of the back end systems I developed was to unify a disparate computing environment.  The company had acquired several synergistic business units and merged them together to make a "more efficient" whole company. 

Unfortunately, each of the businesses was on different systems, and they did not play together nicely.  There was an insurance claims system running on an AS-400, a medical bill review running on Linux and the corporate financials running on AIX.  They processed thousands of transactions between each of these systems every month.

We built a message queue based system that extracted the appropriate data from each system and transmitted it to the target system.  Once there, it was translated into the proper format and uploaded into that system.   This included medical bills that were entered in the claims system and rated on the bill review system, then returned to the claims system.  It also included automated service invoice creation and payment between these various systems.   In the end, the whole thing operated as one system and eliminated tons of manual labor and chances for errors.

Another company received hundreds of emails on a regular basis with data from service bureaus they have contracts with.  This data may be in any number of various formats and is sometimes redundant.  The system we developed reads the incoming mail, determines which format and how to process the attached data, then parses everything out and uploads it into the database.

From there all of the data is processed and turns into transactional data that is ultimately used to create a large volume of invoices and payments that are automatically mailed to the customers.  The data is also loaded into the corporate finance system to keep the "official records" of the transactions.

These projects do lot of work and accomplish a lot for each organization, but they don't have the glitz and glamour of a 3D user interface.