Case Studies
Correctional Services Canada
Profile
Migrating VAX Alpha VMS ,PowerHouse 4GL, Borland Interbase applications to Oracle and Microsoft Web Architecture.
Correctional Services Canada (CSC) is the Canadian federal government agency that is responsible for managing institutions of various security levels and supervising offenders under conditional release in the community.
The Challenge
The Offender Management System (OMS) is a character-based, custom application that was built using Cognos PowerHouse® in the early 1990’s, and runs on Compaq’s Alpha VMS servers. Information on every offender in the federal correction system, including their offense, sentence, diagnosis, rehabilitation program and parole board decisions, as well as victim information, is managed in the system Currently, at the time it tracked about 25,000 active offenders, and there are approximately 150,000 case files in the system. Staff from both CSC and the National Parole Board NPB) and contractors use the OMS application internally, along with over 8,000 external users, including staff at the correctional facilities and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. There were three main problems associated with the OMS:
- Technology obsolescence: The OMS database was Borland InterBase®, which was no longer supported on the VMS platform as of 1999. This was the primary consideration that drove CSCs decision to modernize their application.
- Costs: The costs to support and maintain the OMS application were immense. “There were six application server clusters scattered across the country; and there were more than 50 physical databases,” noted Tom Black, Manager of Conditional Release Operations . “Legislative changes meant that the OMS business rules were constantly in a state of flux, and in order to implement any updates or new releases, the entire system had to be shutdown for up to two days at a time. This happened at least twice a year.”
- Functionality: While the custom functionality of OMS met the majority of current business needs, there were some requirements it simply could not accommodate. For example, CSC wanted to include photos of the offenders in the system, and PowerHouse simply couldn’t accommodate this requirement.
CSC needed a solution with a better architecture that preserved 100% of the custom-built application functionality they relied on. And because a large number of users were not tech-savvy, the new application had to replicate the old UI, as much as possible, in order minimize training costs. As well, a web-based solution was desirable from a deployment and maintenance perspective.
Why CORE Migration™
NPB initially looked at three alternatives – buy, build and migrate.
- Buy:Â They looked for an off-the-shelf package that would meet their specialized business requirements, but none was available. The Canadian parole decision process was simply too unique and dynamic, making this approach too expensive and time consuming.
- Build:Â They considered rewriting the application from start to finish. Although this would have allowed them to duplicate their custom functionality, they lacked the application development skills necessary to complete such a large project. And the cost and timelines associated with this option were prohibitive.
- Migrate:Â Migrating the old application to a more modern web application was the third option they considered.
CSC chose CORE Migration because it guaranteed100% preservation of existing functionality. In addition, CORE Migration’s migration solution enabled CSC to automate much of the process, and gave CSC the assurances that the project would be faster and less expensive than the other alternatives. “CORE Migration was simply the lowest risk alternative available to CSC,” added Black.
CORE Migration
The Process:Â Because they needed to be closely involved with the migration process and understand the inner workings of the new solution, CSC chose to go with the CORE Directed migration option in which CORE Migration people work together with the client, as partners in the migration process. CORE was responsible for development including Unit testing, while CSC was responsible for functional anc acceptance testing. Using this approach, the CORE Migration team completed the design preservation process by parsing the source code and putting it in the new CORE Oracle repository. The CORE Migration team customized the Forward Engineering (FE) tools that are necessary to migrate the application, to ensure that the generated code would be optimized for CSC’s specific requirements. The CSC team was also trained to use the the new system and were instrumental in testing the UI and baytch processes.Â
The Solution:Â The OMS-R technology architecture provides a native web architecture . The web-native architecture provides full Internet or Intranet data entry, query and information distribution with reporting capabilities in PDF, XML or other web-enabled formats. This is especially beneficial for companies with line maintenance requirements as well as multi-site and multi-national companies.
“Our OMS-R technology architecture makes extensive use of the Oracle database architecture,” says Black. “Business logic is processed by a combination of backend objects and database level triggers and procedures that maximize reliability, performance, extensibility and maintainability. System access is controlled using a single logon , while reporting and query are managed by the Portal. The OMS is fully integrated to Oracle for alert notification and workflow processing. Additionally, the OMS-R architecture provides complete, user-specific language independence; support for double-byte characters; context sensitive help and embedded computer based training wizards.”
Results
The CORE Migration team has delivered the modernized application to CSC, and supported the final acceptance testing and implementation-planning phase. The web-based screens look almost identical to the original UI, meaning there is almost no need for end-user training. But because of the new architecture, application access and navigation are faster and easier, particularly for new users. And with the simplified architecture, future functionality enhancements can be rolled out almost instantly, with no down time. So, in addition to the obvious business benefits this provides, they also anticipate a time saving for system administration.
“We’re extremely impressed with the quality of our new web application. CORE Migration preserved all of the custom functionality we valued, but also leveraged the inherent advantages of the web,” says Black. “Our employees are thrilled with the ease of use of the new application, while the IT staff is ecstatic with its ease of maintenance.”