Innovator of the year - Enterprise Engineering Solution

1. 1st PLACE
Gulf Insurance System architecture resulting
from 199© JAD sessions still a sound foundation
INNOVATOR
tans of mission-critical client/server
at Gul ftp plication Prof lie
Name: Gulf In-
surance System
Purpose: To
provide process-
It stemmed from a 10-week time period in 1990 when Gulf Insurance ing of business
from first cus-
Information Systems (I/S) analysts and modelers conducted intense tomer contact
through policy
Joint Application Design (JAD) sessions with business managers. The issuance and
maintenance.
firm's computing architecture was defined at a high level, with all its Benefits: Speeds
the policy is-
critical success factors reflected Claims management is being suance process,
in the enterprise data and turned into a project based on tracks submis-
process models. These were Notes from Lotus Develop- sion status.
then used to craft an application ment, now of course owned by Platforms: DB2
development plan, which the IBM. Off-the-shelf financial ap- on MVS; DB2
company has been implement- plication packages are under for OS/2; OS/2;
ing since. consideration whenever they Novell NetWare
Thirty projects were identi- fulfill requirements. 3.12.
fied. Initial development fo- Gulf exemplifies the
cused on those most needed to strength of IBM in the insurance
support the business. The result- industry. "When we made a lot
has been the delivery of several of our decisions, we tried to
successful client/server applica- minimize the number of ven-
tions that continue to perform dors that we were going to be
mission-critical work for Gulf involved with," said Glen
Insurance. White, senior vice president of
The Gulf Insurance System Information Services for the Irv-
(CIS) is an application architec- ing, Texas-based insurer. "When
ture crafted from years of we started on it, there were a
thought and planning, which limited number of products and
has used modified systems of the direction we went was safer.
information engineering to de- When we review where we are
liver five mission-critical appli- going in the future, we will be
cations. The system platform much more open to other solu-
today is built on a three-tier, client/server architecture, tions," he said.
using OS/2 on clients, Novell NetWare local-area net- When the system went into production in the sum-
works (LANs) and IBM mainframes. mer of 1992, there were no real alternatives to OS/2
The following applications have been delivered: for 32-bit operating systems running on Intel-based PC
Submission, Reinsurance, Producer, Policy and Diary. platforms. Microsoft just got to that in 1995. "We've
BY JOHN D E S M O N D
APPLICATION DUVIil.OI'MRNT TRENDS MARCH 1996 95

2. 1st PLACE made [OS / 2] work and it has worked great for us," said sign, including online navigation diagrams, screen and
Chris Dostal, assistant vice president of Information report designs; and a procedure design.
Services at Gulf, who was project leader for the GIS. The distance separating the I/S architects and ana-
"The press causes as much of a problem for OS/2 as lysts in Dallas and the business executives in New York
anybody." was a continuing challenge for the developers. Anoth-
Because there are not as many desktop productivi- er was that Gulf's information systems experience was
ty tools available for OS/2 as there are for Windows, built on Cobol, CICS and Vsam on IBM mainframes.
Gulf is currently evaluating its "When I first came here, Cobol was
desktop operating system of the
future. "We're going to look at the
Gulf Team what most people knew," said
White. "It was a mainframe, main-
best way for the corporation to go. tenance-type of environment. We
There is a strong possibility that Glen White, Senior VP, had culture changes to go through
we may end up porting some of Information Services to get people up to speed." Moving
METHODOLOGY: this tu the Windows environ- >Experience: 20 years in from developing CICS screens to
Navigator, ment," White said. Ironically, one insurance industry developing graphical user interface
Ernst 8i Young application users would like to see (GUI) screens with Presentation
© Circle Reader more current under OS/2 is 1-2-3, Chris Dostal. Project Manager, Manager, was a big change.
Service No. 143 the spreadsheet from Lotus De- Assistant Vice President of The company hired Ernst &
velopment/IBM. The OS/2 ver- Information Services Young, New York City, to help them
DESIGN: sion of 1-2-3 is lagging the Win- *• Experience: 20 years in insurance through it. E8CY brought in its Nav-
DB2 tools, dows Version in release updates. industry, project management, igator methodology, which was
Bachman "What will the world look like analysis and design used at the beginning of the project
Information in five years? Who knows? I think during the analysis phase. When it
Systems Inc. we made the right decision back Gregg Birdsall, Chief Architect, came time to transition to the tech-
© Circle Reader then," said Dostal. Because Gulf Systems Manager nical design, Navigator had no doc-
Service No. 144 fielded a production client/server >• Experience: Technical umentation at that time related to
application several years ago, the background, with Equifax and Gulf Presentation Manager. "Not all the
ADW tools, desktop machines are less "per- Insurance, oversees cookbooks were there for us to
Knowledgeware sonal" than many PCs. "Every development tool selection use," Dostal said. E&Y has since up-
(now owned by time we introduce a component dated Navigator to support GUIs.
Sterling Soft- on the user's workstation, we have to make sure it does The developers persisted, at times resorting to inven-
ware Inc., called not impact the performance or operation of the pro- tion. "Sometimes, the technology was not quite there
KEY: Workgroup) duction systems," said Dostal. The workstation is not when we needed it."
© Circle Reader their personal PC like they have at home. It's running The Knowledgeware tools (now called KEY:Work-
Service No. 145 corporate business applications." group by Sterling Software) were used for process and
Here is how the GIS works: The. user interface on data modeling, and the Bachman tools for physical
TESTING: the workstations connect to the communication and database modeling. The data models have been sound,
AutoTester, database portions of the system by issuing Cobol calls. and the work flows that were defined and used to de-
AutoTester Inc. Through the call interface, requests are made to, for sign the GUIs have been consistent. These models have
© Circle Reader example, retrieve a policy. The communications sub- withstood many technology changes since then intact.
Service No. 146 system uses APPC facilities to transmit the request "We have a very sound foundation. Those models will
from the user's workstation to the LAN database serv- carry us forward into any technology," White said.
VERSION CONTROL: er. If the request cannot be satisfied there, it is fur- The developers discovered by accident that the data
PVCS, warded via APPC to the host system for processing. model was an excellent road map for GUI design. "We
Intersolv Inc. Once the requested data is on the LAN database, the worked hard to make sure our data model reflected the
© Circle Reader client UI programs interact directly with the database business. We found that if the windows flowed along
Service No. 147 server. Gulf is running DB2 for OS/2 on the worksta- the way the data model flowed, they felt good to the
tions and on the OS/2-based application database serv- user. When they did not, we had not done a good job
Languages: er, and DB2 for MVS on the host. of transferring data to the GUI," Dostal said.
Micro Focus Executives from Gulf Insurance Group drove the The firm went off product maintenance on the
Cobol, Micro Fo- vision of the project after the Specialty Insurance ADW tools immediately after Knowledgeware was ac-
cus Inc. Group was formed at Gulf in 1987. Although the sys- quired by Sterling, but has since gone back on. "They
© Circle Reader tems in place met all regulatory requirements, a lot of have some good plans going forward, but I still have
Service No. 148 information was not being captured, and the business some doubts," White said.
was projected to grow rapidly. The I/S team needed a Since the first client/server applications went into
Gobol II, C/Set more flexible architecture. production in 1992, the Gulf developers have gone
andC/Set+ + , For each development project, the team defined a through several continuing challenges. Inevitably, the
IBM (now called business systems design. This included: a logical data team began receiving complaints about performance.
VisualAge for model, with attribute definitions; a business overview, Response in the New York office might be slow, while
C++) with data flow diagrams and transaction/pro cess ma- Dallas was not complaining. The team needed a way
trices; process decomposition diagrams; external de- to get some timings out of the system.
96 APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT TRENDS MARCH 1996

3. Software Engineering
Test tools from Auto Tester Inc., a test tool suppli- Cobol, but work is under way to port to 32-bit C. The
1st PUCE
er based in Dallas, were brought in for a try. "In a week- Gulf developers have found that C is a better language
end, we had it up," Dostal said. The team recorded for the presentation area, and Cobol is better for work-
scripts to produce timings for business functions. Us- ing with databases. "We will probably end up with a
ing Systems Performance Monitor (SPM/2), a moni- mix," said Birdsall.
toring tool, to capture the measurements, they base- The future application development workbench at
lined the time needed to execute the most frequently Gulf is likely to include object technology. One devel-
used business functions, such as preparing a quote let- oper is experimenting with IBM's Visual AgeforC++,
ter. As they added memory to desktop machines or the follow-on to IBM's C/Set tools for OS/2, which
tuned up the database, they repeated the tests. "It gave will not be updated. "I'm very interested in objects
us a way to quantify what we could deliver in terms of right now," said White. "It's in its infancy, but it makes
performance improvements. We had something to put a lot of sense to me to go after a more OO approach
our arms around for the executives to approve," said to everything. We're looking at what it would take to
Dostal. In effect, they used the lest tool to create sim- get there." Gulf may be working with an IBM
ulations they then used for capacity planning. Gulf also development team in Dallas, Texas, on some object
does application testing in several stages including sys- technology.
tem testing, preproduction release testing and user ac- Whatever the application development toolset of
ceptance testing. the future turns out to be, Gulf will evolve from its cur- "Not all the cook-
The management of the distributed system has rent systems. "We will carry forward the things that
been and continues to be the most difficult problem. work. It will be more of a migration, versus what we books were there
Tools that have been used include IBM's Distributed did back then, when we obliterated our processes and for us to use."
Console Access Facility (DCAF/2), which can take over brought in a new technique," White said.
a workstation screen remotely, and SPM/2. The mid- The successful developers of a mission-critical,
dleware was based on IBM's APPC, which represent- client/server application at Gulf Insurance hope to - Chris Dostal
ed a significant learning curve for the team, so the build on their track record of successful bets as they
work was contracted out. The team used Communi- move to a newer generation of technology. • Gulf Insurance
cations Manager/2 from —.^^——.——^,
IBM to provide LU6.2 links
used by the application
data access subsystem. This
KeaneComment
allows the application the Gulf Insurance System increases professional productivity
flexibility to be set to ac-
cess a high-power database The Gulf Insurance System (GIS) represents a sizable project (360 months of ef-
server or a single-user, fort over 28 calendar months) that produced significant, measurable results. The
workstation-based data- business purpose for GIS was to support and increase the productivity of insur-
base, depending on the ance professionals. Over a two year period, premiums increased by nearly $66
requirement. million, compared with salary expense increases of just $0.3 million and develop-
Custom middleware that ment costs of $6.2 million.
the team had to develop is GIS exhibited strong involvement by the business, which participated in creat-
likely to be replaced by sup- ing the initial vision for GIS, as well as in its development, from the top down.
plied middleware, to be de- By effectively employing an Information Engineering approach, the GIS project
termined. "APPC is isolated built a sound foundation for a complex application. Atlanta-based KnowledgeWare
to a small number of mod- Inc.'s Application Development Workbench (ADW) was used to build the business
ules, so it can be ported to a models, and tools from Bachman Information Systems Inc., Burlington, Mass., were
different protocol," said used to design the logical data model. Using these tools in Joint Application De-
Gregg Birdsall, systems velopment (JAD) sessions, the project team developed an enterprise data model
manager, who was the ar- and extensive business process models. During development, CASE PM was used
chitect of the CIS. for code generation.
For word processing, The GIS project team applied appropriately and modified as necessary New York
WordPerfect documents City-based Ernst & Young's Navigator software development methodology. Naviga-
were merged with system- tor proved most useful in the early phases of the project. The project team cus-
generated data files, to al- tomized the methodology by adding support for event-driven graphical user inter-
low users to generate poli- face (GUI) development to the technical system design phase.
cies, contracts or other Because GIS is a distributed, two-tiered, realtime application, distributed sys-
documents with minimal tems management was a challenging area. The architecture includes PC worksta-
help from technical staff. tions, local-area network (LAN) database servers and an IBM host repository, which
(WordPerfect was recently communicate using APPC. Initially, due to the lack of management tools, the team
purchased from Novell Inc. had to develop certain tools in-house.
by Corel Corp.) Due to the emphasis on extensive front-end analysis, the project delivered busi-
The original develop- ness models that are of lasting benefit to the organization.
ment language was 16-bit
APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT TRENDS MARCH 97