CASE extends to many dimensions … and its success transcends geographic, demographic boarders - computer-aided software engineering - successful CASE implementation with DEC's Cohesion at Canada's Newfoundland Power utility company - includes related articles on the use of Cohesion by Computer Associates International, Texas Instruments, LBMS, and a definition of CASE - special advertising section; Delivering on the Promise of CASE: Cohesion

Software Magazine, August, 1992

... and its success transcends geographic, demographic borders

As with any other truly successful technology, examples of CASE implementations abound. They can be found in all industries, from financial to discrete manufacturing, utilities to petroleum exploration and refining, aerospace and defense to ... you name it.

And just as the technology knows no industrial boundaries, it reflects the global nature of its users' businesses: they, and the customers they serve, are located all around the world.

Software development itself covers many dimensions: process management, design and development, documentation, maintenance and re-engineering. The following are examples of successful CASE implementation, as seen through the eyes of COHESION customers.

The Churchill River and its tributaries form one of the largest waterpower sources in Canada.

But it is a watershed of a different sort -- the implementation of a number of Digital's COHESION Computer-Aided Software Engineering tools -- that has energized the MIS organization of Newfoundland Power, an electric utility in Canada's easternmost province.

Newfoundland Power's use of Rdb and CDD/Repository will be instrumental in matching its investment in Digital mainframe VAX 9000 technology with superior application development capabilities.

Newfoundland Power, based in St. Johns, provides electricity to over 190,000 customers. It purchases power from Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, and operates the infrastructure that enables it to distribute electricity through its transmission lines, electric facilities, and service capabilities.

The use of CASE technology is important to achieving its goal of providing power at a reasonable price, under the regulation of the provincial Public Utilities Board. Newfoundland Power's application development computing configuration consists of a two-node VAXcluster that includes a VAX 8700 and VAX 9210, a stand-alone VAX 6310, and a VAXstation 3100.

A streamlined MIS organization, made up of 50 employees -- approximately half of whom are systems developers -- supports each of the corporation's three primary business units: customer/service, financial/human resources, and engineering/operations.

Newfoundland Power's applications include accounting, customer service purchasing and inventory, fleet management, employee, timesheet, and facilities systems, among others. Virtually all of Newfoundland Power's applications are written in COBOL; the remainder are Powerhouse and FORTRAN programs.

In the mid-1980s, Newfoundland Power adopted Rdb and Digital's Common Data Dictionary (CDD) to establish its first, formal databases. Lynn Mowbray, former Superintendent of Data Administration, remembers the implementation of this key computing capability. "Before 1985, we were working in a non-database environment, and suffering a lot of data redundancy as a result. There was really no consistency of data even within single datafiles.

"Maintenance was very difficult -- each application was extremely dependent on certain individuals' understanding of it," she said. "As a result, many of our most valuable MIS personnel were effectively prohibited from working on anything but their particular application--that was very limiting."

As business volume grew, its MIS organization turned to CASE tools to remedy these constraints and to give the company greater control over its business. Doing so, however, required a complete reversal of the MIS department's former application-oriented development methodology.

Broad-Based Look

Newfoundland Power took a real broad-based look at the company, and came up with a vision of how the company should work in the '90s. Instead of identifying individual problems and solving them, they identified a number of concerns and came up with a longer-term, more all-encompassing solution.

"Data and function modeling was integral to Newfoundland Power's new I/S methodology," Mowbray said. "Whereas before people said, 'I have an application that has to be written, what data do I need?' They had to reverse that to say, 'What data is the company working with?' and map that down to determine, 'How does my application fit over that data?'"

Mowbry said, "the difference is that the data the company works with always stays the same. It is how you use the data -- the applications -- that change. That's a very different concept."

Newfoundland Power implemented Digital Rdb to rationalize its existing data and organize new data into subject-oriented databases, replacing the application-oriented approach previously employed. Application-oriented data management operates according to what a certain application -- payroll, for example -- needs to know about a certain subject. For an employee, this might include the employee's badge, insurance or social security numbers, and the employee's mailing address.

A subject-oriented approach, on the other hand, stores all corporate data about a given subject in a database. The employee subject database might include each employee's employment history, licenses and trade qualifications and everything else about them that the corporation needs to know.