PA Treasury Department Mainframe Modernization to Windows Pennsylvania Treasury Department Bureau of Information Technology Solutions

Transcription

1 PA Treasury Department Mainframe Modernization to Windows Pennsylvania Treasury Department Bureau of Information Technology Solutions Nomination Category: IMPROVING STATE OPERATIONS Nominated by Denise Bell State of PA Treasury Department Director of IT 129 Finance Building #G10 Harrisburg, PA Project Initiation Date: September 30, 2010 Project Completion Date: October 1, 2011

2 Executive Summary The Pennsylvania Treasury Department, headed by elected State Treasurer Rob McCord, manages and invests the commonwealth s financial assets and serves as a fiscal watchdog, ensuring that tens of billions of dollars in state payments are lawful and correct. Treasury s primary computer system, an overworked IBM mainframe running old VM/ESA and VSE/ESA, had become too expensive to maintain and too expensive to upgrade. The system supported extensive and critical payment and appropriation balance functions. However, aged hardware and processing limitations constrained Treasury from improving practices and supporting needed efficiencies. Making matters worse, the relative fragility of the system exposed Treasury to an intolerable risk of unexpected service interruptions. The mainframe ran COBOL applications handling state budgetary bookkeeping and payment output processing functions. Burdened with custom legacy applications running on outdated hardware, it was essential for Treasury to find a solution that embraces modern processing technologies so it could stabilize its production operations. Treasury developed a strategic process to plan, procure, and implement a comprehensive update of its IT architecture. Although the strategic process is expected to take place over a period of years, the mainframe could not wait. Treasury decided to pursue a relatively immediate, interim solution until more permanent modifications could be made. By temporarily improving payment and appropriation balance functions, Treasury hopes to preserve its ability to deploy an integrated, strategic design that promotes efficiency, flexibility and effective communication across disparate functions. In June 2010, Treasury issued a statement of work for a near-term solution to eliminate the mainframe and its inherent weaknesses and to complement the long-term enhancements envisioned. The new solution was required to offer cost savings (1 year ROI), improved supportability, and superior system functionality. The approach was a code migration to facilitate incremental evolution. Existing source code was reused as much as possible. To minimize training time and costs user interfaces and reports retained their format, style and naming convention. In September 2010, Treasury awarded a contract to T3T, Inc. of Tampa, FL to help re-platform the mainframe onto a Windows environment. In October 2011, Treasury migrated its mission critical mainframe applications into production on a Windows-based infrastructure. The applications now operate on a user-compatible and much more reliable platform. Best of all, the new system shrank batch processing elapsed time by 85% and ongoing annual costs to maintain the new environment are nearly 90% lower than the mainframe.

3 Business Problem and Solution Description Business Problem The Pennsylvania Treasury Department manages and invests the commonwealth s financial assets and serves as a fiscal watchdog, ensuring that tens of billions of dollars in state payments are lawful and correct. It operates innovative programs that generate positive returns for taxpayers and improve the economic security of Pennsylvanians. The department is committed to efficient, productive and transparent operations. Treasury performed its extensive and critical payment and appropriation balance functions on an IBM 9121 Model 210 mainframe. This hardware was aged, and its processing limitations prevented Treasury from making a variety of modifications that would enhance current practices and support efficiencies. The relative fragility of the mainframe exposed Treasury to a higher risk of unexpected interruptions in operation than was considered ideal. In addition, continued reliance upon the mainframe imposed significant maintenance and disaster recovery costs. For example, Treasury staff spent their 2008 Thanksgiving weekend moving mainframe operations from Harrisburg, PA to Texas after a critical failure. This disaster alone cost Treasury $150,000. In short, over time, the mainframe posed a higher risk of interruption to critical processing and had become too expensive to maintain and too expensive to upgrade. Treasury recognized that it needed to eliminate the reliance on aged mainframe technology and end the perpetually high associated hardware and software costs, while also achieving multiple ancillary benefits such as reducing the two-hour batch window during which employees could not work interactively as well as improving reliability and facilitating disaster recovery. The mainframe ran COBOL applications handling state budgetary bookkeeping and payment output processing functions. Burdened with custom legacy applications running on outdated hardware, it was essential for Treasury to find a solution that embraces modern processing technologies so it could stabilize its production operations. Solution Description Treasury developed a strategic process to plan, procure, and implement a comprehensive update of its IT architecture. This involved reviewing current IT mainframe support requirements for the applications and considering all viable alternatives. Treasury determined that its best interim option was to re-platform mainframe COBOL applications onto a Windows-based infrastructure. This approach would reduce

4 Treasury s risk of unexpected interruptions in operations The Windows platform provides the significant reduction in operational costs that Treasury had sought, while also increasing supportability, functionality and agility. The Windows environment required minimal retraining since re-platforming maintains original business logic and financial accounting structure, as well as the look and feel of both screens and reports. The project involved migrating the two custom applications known as Treasury Automated Bookkeeping System (TABS) and Treasury ACH Control System (TACS), while minimizing changes to program source code, data structures, batch job processing, and supporting artifacts. This was an especially important consideration for keeping future maintenance costs at the lowest possible levels. T3T, Inc., of Tampa Florida was awarded a contract to assist Treasury with the lift and shift migration. Treasury s Bureau of Information Technology Solutions (BITS) worked collaboratively with T3T to generate detailed project plans to identify all work elements, resource assignments, timelines, and deliverables such as weekly project status reports, ad hoc problem identification reports, and a project conclusion summary report. T3T provided the Wintel physical environment. The new target platform included: Intel Server in a virtual environment Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 Microsoft Hyper-V The migration included all COBOL, CICS, and batch programs and maps, and JCL and VSAM datasets. Easytrieve applications were migrated to COBOL. The table below identifies how this rapid and compatible migration was accomplished. Source Code Artifact Approach Batch / Online COBOL Programs Programs compiled and linked for execution on Windows-based system. Source code preserved. CSP Programs Programs converted to COBOL CICS programs and maps. Application logic and user experience preserved. Assembler Program Programs rewritten in COBOL (preferred) or C# depending on functionality required. Easytrieve Programs Programs converted to BATCH COBOL programs providing similar functionality. Batch job streams Job streams cataloged for execution on new system. Source code preserved.

5 Source Code Artifact Sequential files VSAM files SQL/VSE Databases Approach Migrated to new system. No schema changes required. Migrated to new system. No schema changes required. SQL/VSE databases migrated to Microsoft SQL Server. No database schema changes required except for platform compatibility. Embedded SQL preserved. The total cost of the migration was $420,000, which is approximately equal to the annual hardware maintenance and software costs of the mainframe. The project timeline from inception to go-live was one year. Significance The Pennsylvania Treasury Department is responsible for tracking the state s money. While simplistic, those few words capture the heart of the department s paramount duty safeguarding the commonwealth s financial assets of more than $80 billion in public funds. The Treasury leads by example, committing itself to efficient and productive service. This re-platforming project was a noteworthy success in several ways: Increased the availability of applications to end users and reduced processing time. Improved Treasury IT s reputation for reliability, streamlined business continuity, and enabled significantly more access to Treasury data and applications. Benefits of the Project The success of this project provided several significant measurable benefits for the Treasury and the citizens of Pennsylvania: Batch processing times were reduced by 87%. This greatly improves employee productivity by making online processing available throughout the workday! The successful completion of this project will allow Treasury to avoid continued high costs to maintain its mainframe.

6 Improved reliability and availability as a result of reduced reliance on the mainframe. As a result of the migration, processes, business logic, and even user screens remained exactly as they were before, which meant no disruption to service or maintenance. With the new Windows environment, Treasury was able to dramatically improve productivity and enjoy huge savings on its IT processing costs. The department is now positioned to be more responsive to user needs by unlocking their data and applications from the rigid environment of the mainframe. Beyond these accomplishments, the re-platforming project supports Treasury s missionwide operation for the commonwealth. This project validates concepts and strategies of the larger in-process agency transformation towards smarter and more accessible government while providing better service and cutting costs.