St. Helens Council administers local government services including education to 177,000 people in northwest England. The local authority was the first on Merseyside to achieve an ‘excellent’ rating by the UK Audit Commission through the annual Comprehensive Performance Assessment. A key business objective for St. Helens Council is to enable the authority’s stakeholders to interact with the Council using electronic means whenever possible, to help increase efficiency and reduce costs while providing improved services. The Council’s IT department adopted Lotus Domino as a component of their strategic IT platform for delivering suitable business systems to achieve the Council’s objective.
The majority of the Council’s existing business systems were running on an IBM compatible Amdahl mainframe and in July 2003, the Council’s Information Computing Technology (ICT) team came to the conclusion that the mainframe environment would not provide a suitable long-term future for hosting a Domino based architecture or meet the needs of the Council’s long term IT objectives.
After analysing all options, including packaged software replacement, and in-house rewrites, St. Helens Council took the decision to consolidate all systems to a Windows and UNIX based infrastucture by adopting a combination approach of packaged and in-house software development to replace all of its existing mainframe systems. The Council’s Chief Officers were then asked to step up to an ambitious target migration completion date for all systems of March 31, 2005. This date was selected as this was the Council’s mainframe contract renewal date and so the whole mainframe infrastucture would have to be decommissioned by then to avoid the ongoing operating costs of approximately £1 million per annum.
The Challenge
With this decision under their belt, the challenge for the Council was how to implement their strategy while ensuring business continuity and the high quality of service their users had experienced for many years using mainframe based systems.
Thorough investigation and analysis the Council’s business and ICT staff found suitable packaged applications available running on Windows or UNIX, which they could implement to replace the majority of their existing mainframe based systems. However, their analysis also showed that two systems delivered very unique business functionality that had been developed and tailored, over the last two decades, to how the Council operated. There simply were no packages on the market that could replace these two systems in a cost effective way The two systems in question were the Councils General Ledger system known internally as the Financial Information System (FIS) and secondly, the Council’s Accounts Payable system, called Creditors.
This was a significant problem for the Council as the March 2005 date for de-commissioning the mainframe was simply not negotiable. If just one system remained running under z/OS on the mainframe, the Council would be liable to incur a large percentage of their original mainframe costs – a massive cost they preferred to avoid.
The Council was therefore faced with just three options. Option one, explore a low cost IBM mainframe-compatible machine and software that they could utilize to execute the two systems on; option two, re-write the systems from scratch within their Lotus Domino environment, or; option three, find a way to migrate the existing systems to run under Windows or UNIX.
Option one was explored but it soon became apparent that to be commercially viable, all IBM mainframe software would have to sit on a server of less than 1.4G and the Council soon discovered that no machine was being produced at that level.
Option two was also considered but with the March 2005 impending deadline so tight and the effort to re-write such complex systems so significant, this option was regarded as extremely high risk, with the potential consequence of any late delivery meaning the Council would be unable to shut down the mainframe in time, jeopardizing much of any cost saving they were trying to achieve. The Council would have to renew the mainframe lease just to run either of these two remaining applications, if they did not complete the re-write in time.
“We simply could not risk embarking on a re-write strategy. Not shutting down the mainframe after all the effort we had invested replacing our other systems was not an option,” said Ste Sharples, ICT Business Manager, St. Helens Council. “We then decided to explore if migrating our legacy applications was a lower risk option,” continued Sharples.
Since the systems involved were legacy business systems and the Council has existing COBOL legacy skills running back to initial training undertook in 1986, the Council decided to call upon the leading provider of legacy application development and deployment software, Micro Focus, to explore option three; how could they re-use their legacy systems but migrate them off the mainframe to Windows or UNIX?
The Migration Project
The migration requirement was to move the business critical ‘Creditors’ and ‘FIS’ applications to either Windows or UNIX.
The ‘Creditors’ system handles all accounts payable items for the Borough including payments to all suppliers on the Council’s books, critical regular payments to the Council’s constituents like Foster Parents and cheque payments to employees. It was originally written in MANTIS, with both batch and online elements accessing DB2 databases and VSAM files on the mainframe.
The ‘FIS’ system is the Council’s General Ledger system and effectively serves as the Borough’s most critical monetary resource management tool. This was written in COBOL, utilized CICS and all data within this system was held in DB2 on the mainframe.
The solution
Micro Focus introduced MigrationWare, a long-term partner specialising in migration and together it was agreed that both applications would be migrated to a Micro Focus COBOL environment on Windows.
The MANTIS 4GL application code was converted to standard Micro Focus COBOL with embedded CICS statements and both the batch and online elements of both applications run under a version of Micro Focus Enterprise Server, one of the products collectively known as Micro Focus Studio. Enterprise Server also handles all data access to the council data, which MigrationWare migrated to Windows while retaining the original data models.
In terms of user interface, the Creditors System character user interface remained intact with the Mantis screens being converted to BMS and thus retaining the same look and feel as the original application. For the FIS system the Council opted to develop a new GUI interface using Lotus Domino. This new user interface provides access to the migrated DB2 data held on Windows by utilizing an ODBC driver
The decision to convert the MANTIS 4GL to COBOL was a very critical decision for the Council, from both a business and technology perspective, and supported by all departments.
“MANTIS and COBOL have much in common in terms of functionality and proven capabilities for creating maintainable business systems and modern COBOL environments have evolved to enable interoperation with today’s contemporary languages and technologies like Java, .NET, XML and Web Services.” said Sharples. “From a business perspective it made sense as our MANTIS developers were also initially trained in COBOL and can easily adapt their skills to look after the newly converted code with very minimal cost in terms of re-training.”
The Benefits
New Strategic IT Infrastructure Realised while Reusing Legacy Assets
The Council has successfully implemented their strategic new IT infrastucture around Lotus Domino component on Windows and UNIX, with no further reliance on the mainframe environment.
In addition the Council reduced costs and risks related to this project by reusing two of their key financial systems including all the original data and data models, exploiting working COBOL code developed over the last 18 years and utilizing the current skills of their existing staff.
“With the migration approach, there’s no need to throw these legacy applications away, instead they can be seen as assets to be re-used in more modern and cost effective environments,” explains Sharples. “The Micro Focus Enterprise Server technology means mainframe shops are not forced down the route of packaged alternatives or rewrites; instead we can reuse, reshape and remould the important systems and data built up over many years on the mainframe.”
Reduced Costs
A major benefit for the Council’s overall strategy to shut down the mainframe is a significant reduction in overall annual operating costs.
Obviously there were upfront costs, including the purchase of packaged applications and servers to run these applications and secondly, the costs related to the legacy migration project itself, which included costs of the migration technology, migration services and a new Microsoft Windows 2000 server but the savings were still dramatic
“The legacy migration project was part of a much bigger project but it was vital in enabling our overall of objective of reducing annual operating costs” said Sharples, “and a saving of £300,000 each year is very significant for the Council.”
Comparable or Improved Performance
The Council’s mainframe was a leased 60 MIPS mainframe that housed all its critical applications, with the Creditor and FIS applications utilizing around 10 percent of the available MIPS on a daily basis.
The Creditors system was the first of the two to progress to performance testing and production on the Council’s new Dell PowerEdge 6650 2-CPU Windows server, and the Council experienced zero degradation in performance compared with the mainframe.
“The first performance comparison we noticed was when we ran a typical batch run that took 40 minutes to complete on the mainframe, including back-ups. Under Micro Focus Enterprise Server on Windows we found the performance to be comparable on our new 2-CPU Windows server. From that point on, any concerns we had related to performance throughput on Windows simply disappeared.” said Sharples.
Since going to production feedback from users of both the FIS and Creditors systems is that online system performance is as good as it was on the mainframe and batch jobs are completing slightly faster even though the ICT team have not yet focused on automation and performance tuning of their batch processes.
Simpler Access to Data and Improved Ad Hoc Reporting
The FIS system is now live, and with Domino forming the new on-line environment, the Council is really recognising the benefits that this approach has yielded. Suddenly information is easily accessible and a new SQL-based reporting system has further served to enhance data access by querying the back end tables directly.
A Solution for Historical Data Access
Although it was not an initial driver for the implementation of the Micro Focus technology, an additional benefit the Council has realised by implementing the Micro Focus solution is that they have utilized it to provide a low cost way to enable access to historical Council data that must be accessible to meet regulatory requirements. The Council simply moved the historical data and the existing COBOL applications that access the data to the Micro Focus environment. This enabled the Council to avoid the costs, effort and time of migrating and converting data to some other format.
“Utilizing the Micro Focus environment we used to deploy our FIS and Creditors applications to also enable access to historical applications was a god send,” said Sharples, “If we had had to convert the amount of historical data we have to keep accessible I’m not convinced it would have been possible in time for our critical March deadline.”
Enterprise System Security and Availability
In terms of security the Council treat the Windows Server that hosts the two migrated applications as a secure server within their IT environment and exploit the security facilities inherent within the Windows Server environment. Given this and the fact that much of the security for the FIS and Creditor systems is integral to the application logic, the Council have no concerns related to any degradation in levels of security or in system availability.
“We have integrated our Windows Server into our datacenter, in the same way we integrated our leased IBM mainframe into our datacenter. If you place it [the Windows Server] in the “glasshouse” as if it was a mainframe then you remove many of the perceived issues about a non-mainframe environment. We have seen comparable availability to the mainframe and have no concerns about the level of security we have implemented being inferior to the mainframe,” said Sharples.
Plans for the future
The Business ICT team is now looking to capitalise on the successful migration of General Ledger and Accounts Payable, to offer a portalised system for the Council’s financial experts. The newly migrated General Ledger and Accounts Payable systems are the two key elements of plans to integrate all the Councils financial systems in the new financial year, drawing elements from Payroll, Council Tax, Education, Local Housing benefit and other financial systems in existence.
The plan is to ultimately provide users with a single portal, where St Helens Council users can access all the above systems, via the look and feel of one portal, incorporating intelligent scanning and Electronic Document and Records Management (EDRM) applications, where users can view paper invoices and other scanned records.
“The mainframe migration project has enabled the Council to revolutionise the way in which we operate. All of our legacy systems have been replaced with packages or re-hosted utilising ground breaking technologies which offer us contemporary capabilities for improved integration, providing scope and opportunity to meet all the future challenges of a modern Council,” said Cath Robinson, Assistant Treasurer (Audit, IT & Efficiency), St. Helens Council.
”As an Excellent Council (Audit Commission CPA 2004) we are committed to providing accessible, modern and efficient services and we are confident that we now have the IT infrastructure which will support us in this aim.”
St Helens Council’s approach to reusing legacy systems highlights how local government can maximize the value inherent in their important legacy applications and data, as part of any wider strategy aimed at improving agility and reducing costs by moving all mission-critical systems off the mainframe. With increased pressure on local government to meet IT ‘key performance indicator targets’, and keep costs to minimum, the Micro Focus solution offers a hugely attractive option for treasurers and IT managers in local government alike.
Quelle: Publictechnology, 22.08.2005
