THE BUSINESS ISSUE

With the advance of e-business, IT organizations confront a number of challenges including:

• Managing multi-platform application environments
• Developing new application management skills

Application modernization is an obligatory transition for all companies that wish to keep their competitive standing by ensuring the longevity of their information systems. Modernization presupposes an ability to rapidly adapt the company’s main applications to new technologies, and open them up to new market standards.

In this climate of sweeping change, IT directors need to know how to work with new technologies while staying true to the spirit of existing legacy applications. This is where ARCAD comes in.

Diverse Environments
Naturally, new technologies will link up with existing databases and processes. Any changes in one or the other can have a big impact on peripheral functions.

• How can you see all these links?
• How can you transfer these diverse components to production in a synchronized manner?

THE ARCAD APPROACH

First, with ARCAD-Observer, you:

• Automatically generate an exact mapping of your applications, programs, components, database fields, etc...complete with cross referencing links - regardless of what platform the items run on.
• Generate graphical Data Models.
• You can modify the graphs, send them in a HTML format.
• Effortlessly generate application documentation.
• Eliminate unused code.

Then, with ARCAD-Skipper, you manage the entire change cycle, including synchronized deployment on heterogeneous servers.  Modernizing your native IBM i applications means making technical choices that will be around years down the road. Whatever strategy you implement, you will encounter four major concerns:

• Gaining a clear and accurate view of existing applications.
• Maintaining stability of your information system despite these far-reaching changes.
• Conserving your teams’ unity and productivity.
• Keeping track of the resulting increased system complexity.

To address these issues, you need to get a handle on the following stages of the modernization process:

• Auditing existing applications,
• Rationalizing applications,
• Documenting business rules,
• Using your database architecture to design new models,
• Migrating RPG code to more recent versions,
• Merging development environments (native, Java),
• Defining a common methodology for development management.

Sharing Skills
When new skills are needed, new resources are usually close behind. The question becomes how to transfer functional knowledge of existing applications to a new population – especially since this knowledge is often stored only in the heads of existing teams. How does an organization accomplish this task as simply and as quickly as possible?

You can rely on ARCAD-Observer to automatically generate and update your technical documentation, including:

• Data models
• Flowcharts
• Program structure charts
• Program calling chains
• Workflow diagrams
• Cross references

In addition, ARCAD lets you centralize existing functional elements in a single place, and enhance this documentation with information entered by developers. The results are produced in HTML format for easy information sharing.

ADVANTAGES