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Australia's Odd Fellows rewrite for C/S future - Independent Order of Odd Fellows Australia Group uses Intersolv Inc.'s APS code generator to write client/server applications

Software Magazine, Dec, 1993 by Graeme Philipson

Society uses Intersolv's APS generator to build core application for new client/server platform

The Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF) Australia Group, a large investment and financial services organization in Melbourne, has slashed its systems development time by using the APS code generator from Intersolv Inc., Rockville, Md. With APS, a single developer buitl a 40-screen clinet/server member management systems, accessing a DB2 database, in less than 10 weeks.

That system is the first of numerous core systems the IOOF plans to rewrite as part of its migration to a client/server architecture.

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The IOOF is a friendly soceity that operates largely in funds management, but also in health insurance, housing loans and consumer credit. It has an asset base of over $2 billion and more than 300,000 customers, referred to as members.

In Australia, the IOOF is the largest group of its type. It operates in a competitive, deregulated financial environment. It has grown in recent years, enlarging its asset base nearly tenfold in the last decade through innovative management and a series of acquisitions and mergers.

This growth, however, has saddled the IOOf with a range of disparate systems. The organization has an Hitachi Data Systems HDS EX50 mainframe running MVS, an IBM 9370 running VM, and a collection of Wang VS midrange computers. The IOOF is consoldiating all of these systems to run under IBM's DB2 on the HDS machine, using OS/2 workstations as clients.

"Four years ago, we didn't have an information systems strategy, or an MIS department as such," said Paul Collins, development manager of IOOF's information systems division. "We realized that we needed to do something to stay competitive. The worldwide recession has hit the state of Victoria more severly than anywhere else in Australia.

"We decided to base our application development on a cooperative processing-based system that could take advantage of the power, flexibility and effective price/performance of PC LANs [local-area networks],"

based on a DB2/CICS system as our server, with OS/2 machines running in a classic client/server configuration. That meant rewriting our core systems, using the OS/2 platforms as user-friendly front ends to the corporate data on the mainfrme."

EXAMINED TOOLS MARKET

Collins Joined IOOF two years ago, after a long period working as a contractor on large redevelopment projects. "In some of those projects I had become familar with a wide rage of code generation tools," he said, "and I strongly advised IOOF to look at some of the new generation products.

"We looked at the market for tools that would allow us to develop GUI [graphical user interface]-based front ends on the OS/2 platforms, with strong links to the DB2 database," Collins continued. "They had to produce systems that were easy to develop [and] easy to use, but which were robust enough to serve the needs of a large financial organization in a very competitive market."

When Collins joined IOOF, the organization was using ADW from Knowledge Ware Inc., Atlanta, and Micro Focus Cobol from Micro Focus, Palo Alto, Calif. IOOF examined these and many other application development tools he explained.

"At that time, May 1992, there were no GUI cooperative development tools that interfaced with ADW and Micro Focus, so we put that development approach on hold and instead looked for better ways of developing our DB2/CICS systems.

"We asked Intersolv to build a simple six-screen member audit retrieval system that accessed and wrote back to the DB2 database. They built it in 12 days using APS Version 2.1. That showed us the product could do what we wanted."

Soon after this pilot, Collins said Intersolv provided the IOOF with an early release version of APS 2.2. "We trailed its GUI cooperative generation capabilities and proved it to be viable by building a 20-screen table maintenance system," he said.

"Before we started using APS, we were not able to easily built the sort of GUI cooperative processing platforms we wanted," said Collins. "We didn't have the right tools, and we didn't have the expertise."

He continued, "APS handles virtually all the GUI screen generation and cooperative communication, which take up most of a programmer's time. It combines with Cobol development techniques to make GUI application development easy It has allowed us to convert to a database server approach without affecting our development effort."

DEVELOPMENT KEY TO FUTURE

Collins said the new development method will play an important part in the IOOF's future. The first IOOF was founed in England some time in the 1970s as a fraternal society which looked after its members' interests in such areas as helath, funerals and providing for their children's education.

In Australia, the group had its origins in the great Australian gold rush of the 1850s. There was some connection between the English IOOF and the Australian IOOFl, but these ties were served earlier this century. There are also Indpendent Order of Odd Fellows organizations in several other countries, including the United States.

Technology Industry

Australia's Odd Fellows rewrite for C/S future - Independent Order of Odd Fellows Australia Group uses Intersolv Inc.'s APS code generator to write client/server applications

Software Magazine, Dec, 1993 by Graeme Philipson

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