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The National Parole Board (NPB) is the Canadian federal government agency that has exclusive authority to grant, deny, cancel, terminate or revoke day parole and full parole privileges for inmates of the federal correctional system. It has 400 employees distributed across the country.

The Challenge

The Offender Management System (OMS) is a character-based, custom application that was built using Cognos PowerHouse® in the early 1990’s, and runs on Compaq’s Alpha VMS servers. Information on every offender in the federal correction system, including their offense, sentence, diagnosis, rehabilitation program and parole board decisions, as well as victim information, is managed in the system Currently, it tracks about 25,000 active offenders, and there are approximately 150,000 case files in the system. About 300 NPB members, staff and contractors use the OMS application internally, along with over 8,000 external users, including staff at the correctional facilities and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. There were three main problems associated with the OMS:

• Technology obsolescence: The OMS database was Borland InterBase®, which was no longer supported on the VMS platform as of 1999. This was the primary consideration that drove NPBs decision to modernize their application.
• Costs: The costs to support and maintain the OMS application were immense. “There were six application server clusters scattered across the country; and there were more than 50 physical databases,” noted Tom Black, Manager of Conditional Release Operations at NPB. “Legislative changes meant that the OMS business rules were constantly in a state of flux, and in order to implement any updates or new releases, the entire system had to be shutdown for up to two days at a time. This happened at least twice a year.”
• Functionality: While the custom functionality of OMS met the majority of current business needs, there were some requirements it simply could not accommodate. For example, NPB wanted to include photos of the offenders in the system, and PowerHouse simply couldn’t accommodate this requirement.

NPB needed a solution with a better architecture that preserved 100% of the custom-built application functionality they relied on. And because a large number of users were not tech-savvy, the new application had to replicate the old UI, as much as possible, in order minimize training costs. As well, a web-based solution was desirable from a deployment and maintenance perspective.

WHY CORE Migration™

NPB initially looked at three alternatives – buy, build and migrate.

• Buy: They looked for an off-the-shelf package that would meet their specialized business requirements, but none was available. The Canadian parole decision process was simply too unique and dynamic, making this approach too expensive and time consuming.
• Build: They considered rewriting the application from start to finish. Although this would have allowed them to duplicate their custom functionality, they lacked the application development skills necessary to complete such a large project. And the cost and timelines associated with this option were prohibitive.
• Migrate: Migrating the old application to a more modern web application was the third option they considered.

NPB chose CORE Migration because it guaranteed100% preservation of existing functionality. In addition, CORE Migration technology enabled them to automate much of the process, and gave them assurances that the project would be faster and less expensive than the other alternatives. “CORE Migration was simply the lowest risk alternative available to NPB,” added Black.

CORE Migration

The Process: Because they had few development resources to commit to the project, and wanted the fastest possible solution, NPB chose to go with the CORE-Directed migration option. The two organizations started by working together during a conceptual phase to scope out the architecture of the new solution. Upon completing this task, NPB gave the CORE Migration team their PowerHouse source code. CORE Migration experts completed the design preservation phase by parsing the source code and storing each of the system attributes in a repository. The existing Interbase database was then replicated in Oracle. The Forward Engineering toolkit was used to generate a new Com+/ASP application that matched the functionality of the legacy system.

“The CORE Migration team worked closely with us throughout the process to resolve design issues, to address features that couldn’t be directly transferred from PowerHouse, and to present us with alternatives for performing tasks more efficiently or effectively,” observed Black. “For example, they recommended replacing the document distribution functionality in the legacy system with a call to the PC’s default email application. This solution was more efficient and allowed us to further leverage our investments in Microsoft Outlook®.”

Once the migration process was complete, NPB performed unit and functional testing, and validation. NPB also received hands-on training of their modernized application.

The Solution: The new solution replicates the existing functionality in a web-based GUI. It is an ASP/COM+ application running on a Microsoft Windows 2000® application server, with a centralized Oracle database serving the entire organization. The CORE-Directed migration option ensured that the work did not adversely impact the day-to-day NPB operations, as the legacy system was not affected by the system changes throughout the development process. The application servers and databases, which were previously distributed across Canada, have been centralized into one application and one database server. This will significantly reduce the maintenance requirement.