The 1990's were dominated by fixing the year 2000 problem in legacy environments, just like the 2010s are all about modernizing legacy systems deployed back in the 1970s and 1980's. This systems are 30 to 40 years old, and the people that know them, or can maintain them, are retiring rapidly. CIOs recognize the challenge of modernizing systems, and StereoLOGIC adds the ability to make blueprinting the existing system far easier.

StereoLOGIC™ has been used in extremely complex legacy modernization since the tool was first launched years ago. The tool is designed to harvest the knowledge of the existing systems environment, and make it possible to share this understanding broadly across a diverse project team. This is because StereoLOGIC first captures the business logic into a format that can be shared, and secondly, users are able to redact private data from screens, making it possible to share the understanding of an existing system broadly across a project team or international boundaries without fear of exposing client confidential information.

One of the most significant challenges of legacy modernization is being certain nothing is missed. With complex rules, even more complex processing and business logic, few coding standards, and decades of patches and fixes, it is extremely difficult to take a systematic approach to validating if something was missed. Yet, this is the key issue that keeps a CIO up at night when the legacy reengineering is dealing with a core system that touches many users - what happens if something key is missed, and the business is not able to function after months or years of development. StereoLOGIC™ captures the business process flow and data flow across platforms - this means the project management team can hand a blueprint of the current application to developers, and have analysts embed essential business logic for manual steps or system logic behind process steps or screen shots in documentation. This means a higher quality implementation with fewer unwelcome surprises for users and developers at the end.

OKAY, so you have a deadline of 24 months to modernize a key application. What approach do you take? The core application is well understood, but periphery processes are not well documented. In fact, when you look at it, documentation is either too detailed, or non-existent - this means there is a long, long road to travel before you are ready to even think about starting the modernization effort. What will you do?

StereoLOGIC™ pulls the guess-work out of redocumenting a legacy system. By stepping through each of the screens, users or analysts are able to very quickly assemble the high level business logic of the application. To this understanding, they are now able to attach more detailed descriptions of system functions or business rules from their existing documentation and identify areas where little is known about the behind the scenes functioning of an application. In essence, StereoLOGIC™ provides a far more controlled approach to reassembling documentation - and invariably cuts the time required to achieve a complete understanding of the existing system by 40% to 60%.