 | A strategic investment returning immediate pay-back Customer: Landstinget Vastmanland
Authors: Olle Berg and Bengt-Ola Isetoft
Country: Sweden Landstinget Vastmanland is a Regional Medical Service Center in Sweden with about 6,000 employees, most of them doctors and nurses. Olle Berg, Senior IT Manager between 1985-1996, states, "In 1993 we had a difficult IT situation with a rapidly growing backlog of user requirements within a wide range of areas and often a demand for almost immediate delivery. Our IT organisation was not at all prepared to meet these expectations and I personally investigated a number of ways how to solve this issue. To hire lot of external consultants for traditional mainframe or PC-based development or to buy a set of external application packages were less promising for cost and flexibility reasons as well as risk exposure. After careful consideration my final decision was to introduce APL2 as our premier development environment. This decision was taken after a successful pilot installation and estimations of what we could expect to achieve. One of the major issues we faced was how to manage role-based access to information stored in central databases, without the need for complex products or costly administration. Requirements to secure very good performance for all SQL queries executed was almost immediately solved in the APL2 environment which made our confidence grew and the decision was finally easy to take. We dedicated a small team of experienced developers to provide the services, covering all areas from development to operations and support. The results soon exceeded by far our high expectations and later estimations have shown that we saved a number of million USD over the next few years. I also believe that we could not have been able at all to solve all tasks without APL2. The speed, flexibility to change, overall cost and quality provided during those years with APL2 are still unmatched." Olle Berg continues: "Within a period of three years, development and implementation of a number of applications took place, with hundreds of users introduced within a few weeks after deployment. High development speed and a very reliable operations environment were from the beginning critical success factors. Among the applications we introduced was a data query and reporting tool which was used by many users, either for free ad-hoc queries or prepared reports. All users were using this under the control of the security system we designed to provide role-based access to information in databases and files. I also remember when a critical lack of functionality was discovered in our payroll system. We managed to overlap this gap by quickly developing and testing an APL2 solution for this critical need, just in time to avoid serious delays in the payroll process. Almost all work was done by a small development team with one senior developer and two part-time senior consultants, assisted by a system programmer who provided technical services i.e. DBA and backup services. The development work was mainly done in close co-operation with business representatives using agile development methods similar to those found today in Extreme Programming (XP) and other modern methods. My personal opinion is that the total savings achieved by this successful APL2 development, compared to other available alternatives, exceeded ten million USD seen over the first six-year period. The savings in speed and agility are not easy to quantify but all applications were developed, tested and put into production within a few weeks or months including pre-study work. We have neither before nor after seen something comparable" Bengt-Ola Isetoft, former IBM employee and during 1993-2000 responsible for the APL2 development team at the Regional Medical Service comments: "IBM's APL2 implementation in mainframe was, and still is, from my point of view: - A full-ledged and mature environment for development and execution of a wide range of applications
- One of the most cost-efficient environment for more complex application development, seen over the total application lifecycle
- Overall the most stimulating and exciting development environment I have ever seen. Today when everybody talks about SOA, Service-Oriented Architecture, I realise that I have been working according to these principles since the early 1980'ies thanks to APL2.
We based our core development on APL2 mainframe, in a small-scale VM/SP environment which existed during the years 1992 - 2000 beside legacy systems in a CICS/VSE environment. At the same time a number of PC applications and groupware were introduced to provide office and collaboration features to thousands of users. APL2 was the base in a strategy to establish in-house systems development services to provide new IT solutions to many users and solve urgent needs within a very short timeframe. The applications were initially Data Warehouse and statistical systems, based on a common report- and analysis tool and environment but there were also a number of complex applications developed which solved needs in a number of areas. APL2 was also used as a converter and bridge between systems which had none or immature interfaces for data exchange. The main benefits by the APL2 development were: - Very fast application development and maintenance
- Heavy user involvment depending on the highly interactive environment, which lead to high-quality and well tested applications
- Prototyping and traditional development was almost the same, the quality of prototypes was good enough to put into production since they were developed with the same methods and same technology. What differed between a prototype for evaluation and a ready-for-production application was often just the amount of testing. - applications which could be enhanced and improved over many years without decreasing flexibility or quality, depending on design and a service-oriented approach, SOA before it was commonly known and accepted.
- Very low total cost, both for development, operations and overall lifetime
I wish for the future that the APL language continues to live and develop and I am still totally convinced that the unique design of APL is the best implementation of a developer-friendly computer language we have ever seen" | |
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