Celebrating A Modernization Deployment

Over the last couple of months we, with the help of our great partners Barrington Consulting and Service Nova Scotia, have deployed a new system for both the Vital Statistics and the Department of Motor Vehicles of the province of Nova Scotia, into production. Hundreds of people all over the province of Nova Scotia lined up to get copies of their birth certificate and register their new truck. And it worked. Some of the regulars told us it was one of the smoothest go-lives they had ever experienced in the province.

So: We went in, aligned and analyzed their existing, expensive, mainframe application and replaced 2,393,000 lines of Natuaral/ADABAS code with 483K lines of Java and 195K lines of XHTML, and then successfully deployed the sucker.

You could also rephrase that as: we went in, took out a barely beating heart, and put in a brand new one; patient got up, thanked us and walked away. The enterprise software equivalent to jumping over a car.

One could call that an exceptional achievement, maybe even heroic, but we like to consider ourselves to be pretty exceptional and heroic to start off with. For a lot of us, me included, this project was a huge confirmation of our tools, our methods and our people. We know what we are doing, and we are about to do it again and again.

We have already started several other engagements, and have improved our processes and methods to yet another level. While some companies have to introduce continuous improvement, we at MAKE could not imagine not trying to do it better, faster, cheaper and, most importantly, safer, every single time. So what does a team do when they beat the industry average and insurmountable odds: they go out for a couple of pitchers of beer. And then go back at it, because we still have a lot of systems to go.

- Mik Lernout