Canada Motor Vehicle Services

Overview

A provincial government department of motor vehicles in Canada is responsible for managing driver licensing, vehicle registration, accident records, traffic violation records, and all other information relating to motor vehicles in the province.

The department’s aging mainframe applications serve as the central nervous system for all of the organization’s most critical processes and data. Developed on an obsolete platform, the agency had become increasingly concerned about the ongoing viability of their systems.

Challenge

Much of the department’s core application was written in complicated Assembler code. The people responsible for maintaining that code over the years had already retired. When they left, some of the most important knowledge about the agency’s software went out the door with them. That left the organization in a very weak position, with no viable way to update and maintain their code going forward.

The remainder of their applications were written in the Natural programming language, with Adabas as the organization’s mainframe database. Those technologies had grown increasingly obsolete over the years, with fewer and fewer skilled engineers available who could work with them.

IT leaders at the agency grew increasingly concerned about their systems and clearly understood that they needed to modernize. In addition to their challenges in maintaining existing code, they were facing escalating operating costs and had concerns about the security of their aging systems. They also lacked confidence in their business continuity systems, believing that they needed stronger failover capabilities to prevent harmful system interruptions for their cons.

Officials at the agency turned to two familiar vendors, using a major IT systems vendor as their prime contractor, and selecting Astadia to perform automated code conversion, migration, and testing. Another agency in the same province had modernized their systems with Astadia’s help, so the company came highly recommended from internal provincial sources.

Solution

Astadia deployed its Migration Factory technology to automate the conversion of the agency’s Assembler code to C#, and to migrate the Adabas data to Microsoft SQL Server

In addition to automating most of the migration, officials at the department decided to replace select components of the mainframe system with commercial off-the-shelf software, and to rewrite several of their software utilities to run on Windows.

Results

The IT team was familiar with Astadia’s FastTrack Migration Factory, and they knew of Astadia’s past successes with another agency in their provincial government. They understood that Astadia’s approach to automation would be better, faster, and more cost-effective than other methods, with substantially less project risk.

Even so, IT leaders at the department were pleasantly surprised at how quickly the project moved forward. They were especially happy with the smooth and rapid conversion of Assembly code to C#, which they expected would be problematic.

The migration of the department’s legacy system to Windows proceeded exactly as planned, on time and within budget. They have dramatically reduced costs and eliminated several major risks by moving to a modern operating system, database, and programming language. The organization is now able to hire developers from a large pool of potential candidates, reducing costs and creating a path forward for innovation and agility.