Case Studies
Rescuing data in a Government legacy system
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Challenge
An executive agency of the UK Government was using two packaged applications to deliver front and back-office functions. These applications had fallen out of sync, which was causing errors and service failures. Much of the internal IT resource was taken up remedying these errors and manually processing incorrect outputs. Because of the data volumes being dealt with, human intervention was amplifying the problem and the system’s complexity meant a traditional approach would take more than a year to solve. The situation was leading to significant ongoing costs being incurred, while the in house IT resource could not fix the problem without exacerbating the situation.
The Erudine Solution
The first step was to clone the two existing systems, without interfering with their operation. This was achieved by deploying the Erudine Behaviour Engine (EBE) to monitor their input and output data, and then briefly working with a domain expert until a full behaviour model was built. Once this was achieved, EBE was used to highlight where the two systems had fallen out of sync. EBE was then able to identify the root causes of faults and the appropriate fixes required. Having identified the specific faults, the inhouse team utilised EBE to fix them without risk to the overall system, while utilising EBE in an on-going capacity to identify where changes may cause other errors.
Benefits
By deploying the EBE in this way, the time and cost required to return the systems to synchronisation and fix the errors was significantly reduced. In just six weeks EBE was able to capture the entire system behaviour and produce the clone system, allowing the bugs to be identified and corrected. This was achieved for 90% less than the cost of a traditional approach. Furthermore, a significant saving was achieved as EBE removed the need for manual intervention to correct the errors being generated.