California is eagerly taking steps to improve the success rate of state IT projects: The Department of Technology has completely revamped its project approval process and is emphasizing upfront planning, and this year is putting together a new California Project Management Office (PMO) to lend a hand to agencies and departments that need assistance.
In part, these new initiatives are responding to an ever-changing landscape where cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) are increasingly common within state government. In fact, the department recently issued guidance that gives state entities authority, within limits, to procure cloud-based solutions without its preapproval.
But migrating or modernizing a legacy system onto new technology often is daunting for state agencies, and the cloud’s no different. According to widely reported statistics, only little more than half of state IT projects are deemed successes. Although that sounds bad — and it certainly isn’t good — State CIO Carlos Ramos has pointed out that the rate in the private sector, surprisingly, is even worse.
System migration is and has always been difficult. Perhaps cloud technology and new tools can help California begin to achieve Ramos’ goal of a 100 percent success rate. At least one company from the Sacramento area believes it could help, and a few state agencies already are on board.
As co-founder of the Gold River, Calif.-based Composer Solutions, Steve Soren hopes to help reverse the state’s dismal record of IT project failures, which auditors reported cost the state $985 million between 1994 and 2013. Among the most well known: the Department of Motor Vehicles’ vehicle registration overhaul, CalPERS’ pension system, the state employee payroll system and, most recently, the Department of Consumer Affairs’ BreEZe system.
Soren has worked on several legacy modernization projects with state agencies, including with the departments of Health Care Services, Social Services, Industrial Relations, Developmental Services, Employment Development and Labor Standards Enforcement, as well as Caltrans and the Controller’s Office. Composer, which provides automated legacy assessment, ducumentation, modernization and business rules extraction products, typically works on the front end of projects, prepping state agencies for modernization or to put their software conversion projects out to bid.
“I can’t tell you we will eliminate all failures,” Soren said. “But having a complete understanding of your existing legacy systems’ business rules and the ability to access them at any time is a good way to start.”
Describing the approach, Soren used the analogy of shopping for new clothes. You need a thorough assessment of what’s already in the closet before going to the store. The exercise eliminates the potential for duplication, considers pieces of clothing already owned and informs the eventual purchasing experience.
“You need to know what you have before you can embark on where you want to get to,” Soren said. “I need to understand the ‘as’ before I can design the ‘to be.’”
Delivered on-premises or in the cloud, Composer Advantage — the set of “tools” Composer developed for state modernization projects — is designed to deliver automated discovery, assessment and documentation of large legacy computer applications. The business rules are annotated in plain English and linked back to meaningful information associated with the rules, including any related policies. The business can then begin to request information contained in the applications in ways associated with specific needs. The client can choose to copy the information into an automated bidders’ “procurement library” and/or extract and enhance the application’s business rules, in plain English, with automated tools.
It’s also worth mentioning that Composer Solutions is not the only provider of business rules extraction services. Other competitors in the space include blackboxIT, EvolveWare and SoftwareMining.
Composer Solutions, though, grew out of his belief that many of the state’s technology modernization failures were partly the result of a lack of current documentation and extracted business rules. Many of the state’s critical legacy applications are at least 20 years old, written in second-generation languages and undocumented. In addition, when the subject matter experts on the technical and business sides retire or leave, they take with them the knowledge and understanding of how the systems work.
“Over the life span of a 30-year-old application, written in a language like COBOL or Assembler, the application will undergo thousands of changes, many of which were not documented,” Soren said. “The average application might have a couple of million lines of code, running on old technology and interfacing with too many other systems.”
Legacy systems are not nimble and aren’t easily reprogrammed to respond to immediate needs. Soren cites the example of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s order of unilateral reductions in pay for state workers during the recession in 2008. Then-State Controller John Chiang said the payroll system couldn’t make the adjustments in the requested time frame.
“This is not a simple software problem,” Chiang said at the time, according to the Los Angeles Times. “Reducing pay and then restoring it in a timely manner once the budget is enacted cannot be done … until the state completes its overhaul of the state payroll system and payroll laws are changed.”
“He was right,” said Soren. “He could have brought the whole state payroll system down.”
Since then, Composer has started a legacy system discovery, assessment and documentation process for the State Controller’s Office, as well as starting a proof-of-concept for business rules extraction to provide a more complete understanding of the applications.
The challenge of old legacy applications is made more complex because many programmers familiar with the old languages and program functionality have left state service or retired, taking their expertise with them. New programmers often don’t find current documentation, are cautious about supporting the old applications or simply don’t have the legacy language expertise, Soren said.
Chris Cruz, chief deputy director of operations for the California Department of Technology, said he sought the services of Composer Solutions when he was CIO at the Department of Health Care Services.
“It’s important because it helps you define a core understanding as to what is going on and why so you can modernize and move into a new system,” he said. “It gives you a point in time of the business rules — what they are and and technical requirements. It’s like a gap analysis. It determines what your ‘as is’ is before you move forward.”
Business rules are defined as the “as is” intellectual property of the business. They describe the operations, definitions and constraints that apply to an organization. For example, at the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS), which manages the state’s Medicaid Medical Information, Eligibility and Denti-Cal systems, they might specify a pregnant woman’s eligibility to obtain a particular medication, or how a provider can begin to bill for services he or she provides.
With Composer’s help, Denti-Cal is providing a business rules extraction (BRE) library as part of an upcoming request for proposal for Medi-Cal dental fiscal intermediary services, said Marcie Kahbody, the former Contract Integration and Oversight section chief at DHCS. She said the library allows the department to extract business rules from packaged or legacy software, recast them in plain language, and provide them to external audiences for review.
“Through the BRE library, DHCS/Medi-Cal Dental Services Division (MDSD) will provide business rules/intelligence contained within the California Dental Medicaid Management Information System (CD-MMIS) to potential bidders,” she said. “This will potentially attract more bidders to apply to become the new fiscal intermediary for CD-MMIS and manage Medi-Cal payments for dental care services delivered to millions of Californians.”
Kahbody said DHCS/MDSD also plans to complete and maintain a business rules storehouse for use with ongoing CD-MMIS system maintenance and future system modernization projects.
Cruz surmises that when vendors don’t have this information up front and are forced to re-engineer the effort, costs surge beyond initial estimates.
“It gives the prospective vendors an idea of what the business extracts are and what the business requirements are,” added Cruz. “They understand exactly what the scope of the project and the effort needed to complete it are.”
This story was published in the Fall 2015 issue of Techwire magazine.
