Customer Success: Public Sector
Business Benefits
Relativity Technologies has helped the world's largest public sector organizations realign their enterprise applications with business needs.
Public sector organizations confront the challenge of inflexible and poorly understood enterprise applications. These applications automate core operations on a daily basis. But without the ability to adapt them to support to regulations, legislation, and strategies, the ability of your organization to service the public is compromised.
Relativity Technologies can help. The world's leading public sector organizations have relied on the Modernization Workbench® platform to realign their enterprise application portfolios with strategic needs.
Accelerating Redevelopment through Business Rule Management
U.S. Federal Agency
More than 5,000 business rules discovered and understood; yielded accurate, current functional specifications that sped redevelopment activities.
One of the largest arms of the US federal government opted to migrate from an aging language to the more modern Java environment. Among the last few systems on this aging platform was a particularly important application that controlled financial relationships between the agency and its millions of clients, making it a critical yet highly complex system.
But without detailed knowledge of how the system and its business rules functioned, this was a significant challenge. To accelerate the process, the agency turned to the professionals of RFD & Associates and Relativity Technologies' Modernization Workbench software platform.
When an application is modernized, it is important to ensure that this business logic is carried forward into the new system. To neglect this requirement is to risk losing important functionality, or to have the application function in an unexpected way. As a result, RFD and its consulting partners knew that the discovery of the current business logic was necessary in order to test the modernized system. Doing so would ensure that new application's business rules would be identical to the current system.
RFD chose the Modernization Workbench because of its proven ability to accelerate the discovery and management of hidden business rules. Within just a few weeks RFD's professionals were experts in the use of the software platform.
"Relativity Technologies' software delivered exactly what we needed at exactly the right time," said Anne Davison, president of RFD. "Throughout the application's nearly one million lines of code were buried more than 5,000 business rules. Discovering these rules manually would have consumed an extraordinary amount of time. Instead, our consultants were able to deliver new development specifications ahead of schedule based on the reality of the existing system. And because of the thoroughness of the combined solution, we were able to ensure that all of the business logic was carried over to the converted application."
The result was that the government agency could rely on complete and accurate specifications that exactly matched the current application - accelerating the transition to the standard, lower-cost environment.
Application Modernization to Reduce Complexity
State of North Carolina, DOJ
Application analysis enhanced understanding and developer efficiency; business rule management and re-architecting simplified this complex enterprise application.
To drive efficiency and cut maintenance costs, the North Carolina Department of Justice (NCDOJ) embarked on an Enterprise Application Modernization initiative. As the first step in this process, the NCDOJ decided to modernize the architecture of the Concealed Handgun Permit application (CHP). The CHP system's complexity meant that the project would be nearly impossible to achieve manually. Instead, the NCDOJ turned to Relativity Technologies' Modernization Workbench to modernize this essential system.
To begin any modernization project, it is important that you understand the structure of your application and business processes. The Modernization Workbench analyzed the CHP application -- generating system and program flow diagrams, call maps, data flow diagrams, plus transaction and screen flow diagrams. These outputs allowed the team to understand the structure of the application and streamline its ongoing application maintenance activities.
Then the Modernization Workbench identified the proven business rules buried within the code, componentizing the logic so that it is simpler to modify and replicate. The Modernization Workbench also simplified the application by eliminating redundant code and processes. This meant less code and a less complex system to manage going forward.
As a result, the NCDOJ achieved a modernized system that is less complex, more flexible, and more supportable -- without losing its valuable business processes.
Application Understanding Yields Significant Returns
State of Connecticut
Reports, visualizations, and metrics yield rich understanding of a highly complex application, significantly reducing risk and encouraging connectivity with modern technologies.
The Connecticut State Police, Department of Information Technology (DOIT) operates CONNECT, a legacy communications system that enables officers to access municipal, state and federal law enforcement information through desktop computers or terminals in police vehicles. As mobile technology has become more pervasive, the DOIT recognized that there was an opportunity to give officers more direct access to CONNECT through car terminals, cellular phones, and personal digital assistants.
But before the DOIT could provide this functionality it needed to fully document CONNECT, including the various processes, interfaces, and communications used. Given that there was little existing documentation on the 25-year old system, and only one person who had thorough knowledge of CONNECT, this presented a challenge.
"Early on, we recognized the value of using [the Modernization Workbench] to document the CONNECT system," said Joe Houde, Project Management Consultant to the DOIT. "Results would be more accurate, consistent and faster than if we used people to perform this painstaking and repetitive task. We selected CGI (Relativity Technologies' partner) because of its extensive experience in adapting existing systems to modern environments using the Modernization Workbench."
The powerful Modernization Workbench was immediately deployed to create reports and diagrams that always reflected the latest version of the CONNECT application. These reports documented the interactions deep within each system, allowing analysts to rapidly understand the complex application. Further, with the Modernization Workbench vital business rules and the associated workflow within CONNECT were isolated, further refining the DOIT's understanding of their own system and their ability to manage it. Now armed with detailed information about the application, the DOIT has the information it needs to plan further Enterprise Application Modernization of CONNECT.
Said Joe Houde, "CGI and Relativity Technologies delivered as promised and the department is now able to accelerate with confidence into the next phase of modernizing our system."
