Off into the Wide Web Yonder

For the Air Force, leveraging the SBSS posed a dilemma. "Our philosophy in Web enabling was to just get it done?and to get it done fast," says Dittmer. Yet there was also a need to develop a solution that would last well into the future. After considering the various options, Dittmer and his staff decided to shoot for the sky: They would quickly give the legacy system Web access capabilities and then commit to a complete system reengineering.

The challenge Dittmer and his team faced was to gradually migrate a three-decade-old system that is now hosted on a Unisys 2200 Clearpath mainframe?with data trapped inside a proprietary DMS-100 database?to an open Web-based architecture. Dittmer’s staff is using Relativity’s RescueWare to extract business rules and generate a Java-based user interface and other Web-friendly components from the original Cobol. "We have a million-and-a-half lines of Cobol code that have been touched by hundreds of different programmers, so when we try to make a change to the system, it’s really, really difficult," Dittmer says. But he adds that he believes that the final result will justify all of his staff’s hard reengineering work. The finished platform will allow developers to flexibly deploy components across the Air Force’s entire system and to tie several different supply management systems into a single environment.

Basic Web enabling was completed in December 2000 on the old Unisys system, but the reengineering work continues. "We’re still in the process of converting the user interface to a more graphical orientation," says Dittmer. That work, along with additional front-end error checking and business-rule-logic enhancements, is scheduled for completion later this year. Once that stages is finished, the SBSS is slated to be completely free of the Unisys environment early next year. The 30-month project will cost more than an estimated $10 million (a figure supplied by Relativity, not Dittmer, who declined to estimate cost).

Avoiding the Pitfalls and Perils

While few CIOs doubt the value of bringing Web access to legacy systems, the process is not without its perils. Project leaders must stumble through a forest of conversion and reengineering products in order to find the tool that most closely meets their needs. "There are probably about 200 companies that let you take the user interface and redo it," says Vivek Wadhwa, Relativity’s CEO.

There’s also the not-so-small matter of retraining staff in new, Web-oriented software technologies. Veteran developers accustomed to toiling in a Cobol environment, for example, may have a hard time acquiring new skills. New hires, on the other hand, may have trouble mastering the legacy system’s various quirks and vagaries.