Your industry is in the process of deregulation and your customer service system (CIS) is 25 years old. This legacy system is the backbone of your enterprise and can it be modified without a major rewrite. Further, functional documentation is nearly non existent and funding for any new development must be approved by the taxpayers. Faced with this situation, what would you do? Note: Resigning is not an option.

Here is a summary of what we did for a major power and water public utility:

There was no easy way around this one. We had to dig into the bowels of the CIS application which consist of 1,500 modules and 500 macros written in Assembler as well as the application's core common file.The objectives of this mining expedition were:

To define data elements in the CIS master record, identify and document the originating transaction source and construct a data model suitable for object oriented RAD development and data warehousing.

As we dug deeper and deeper, eachstrata revealed an ancient architecture of data that was neither physically or logically arranged.However, we found that the ancients were wiser than realized for they organized their data in Optional Data Groups. These ODG's were primitive data storage areas within the master record that manage common types of data elements. This proved to be the dramatic break through for deciphering the elusive transaction flow. By employing regression analysis techniques, we uncovered the mystery of transaction processing in relation to the master record update.

Our final step was to organize the data and transactions into normalized form appropriate for interpretation and adaptation by any object orient methodology and 4th generation language.
The net result of our mining efforts produced a wealth of reusable information packaged in a Customer Entity Model consisting of 14 objects. This proved to be far more manageable than 84 ODGs encompassing 3,000 data elements. It also provided the architecture for building the client/server rapid application prototype.

Here is a summary of tools we used:

• For Initial Application Analysis - TSO, program dumps, head and eyes
• For Mainframe Modeling - Foresight (ADW)
• For Entity Relationship Modeling - Erwin
• For Process Workflow Modeling - FlowMark
• For Data Warehouse Model - Inmon Model
• For Documentation - Visio and Microsoft Professional Office