AMENTRA - 2006 JBOSS INNOVATION AWARD WINNER - CERTIFIED SYSTEMS PROVIDER

Category: Certified Service Provider
Winner:Amentra
Submitted by: Amentra Team
Industry: Amentra = Technology / La Petite Academy = Education
Geography: Virginia

Overview
Selected for helping enterprises deploy mission-critical business systems on JEMS through a formal, experience-proven mentoring and software development program.

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1. Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)
Amentra, Inc. offers a distinctively different approach to business and IT consulting. By helping clients deploy mission critical business systems through a formal, experience-proven mentoring and software development program, Amentra has earned industry accolades for combining two areas that have historically been separate service offerings into a single solution: deliverable-based project solutions integrated with IT Mentoring. Amentra has great expertise in retail, insurance, pharmaceutical, telecommunications and finance. Headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, Amentra also has regional offices in Reston, VA and Charlotte, NC. Amentra’s web address is http://www.amentra.com.

2. Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.
The project had several significant business and technical challenges as outlined below:

Cost Justification – Although the application would be expected to save tens of millions of dollars once properly implemented, there was no guarantee of how many iterations would be needed to properly implement the application on a technology stack that had never previously been used at the client or by any of the client development staff.

Regulatory Risk – Application defects would open the client up to violations of state and local regulations with potential negative legal consequences in addition to the associated negative publicity.

Shortcomings of Legacy Infrastructure – The existing technology infrastructure did not provide a reliable way to transfer data between the corporate data center and the branch locations. Adding this capability was a prerequisite for cost-effective implementation and support of the application.

Product Selection Risk – The client would be selecting products in several areas where the client had only minimal experience, including an application server, a portal server, an enterprise service bus, and a rules engine. The client needed assurance that its selection process would be properly informed and would lead to a reasonable solution.

Implementation Risk – The return on investment required to justify the expense of the technology migration forced the client to target a significant amount of scope on its very first implementation in the new framework. In fact, this implementation would be one of the largest single IT projects ever attempted by the client.

Although these challenges were significant, they each also had reasonable solutions that could be addressed by a combination of proper project implementation and proper utilization of the JEMS stack. The challenge with the most far-reaching impact was the issue of the long-term implications of technology migration for the management of the IT department. This challenge alone had several major components:

Potential Loss of Personnel/Business Knowledge – Change, particularly change of implementation language can be traumatic for IT architects and developers. IT staff can go from being experts to complete novices overnight when the required skill set changes. This usually leads to the voluntary attrition of staff that are intimidated by or uninterested in the new technology and the involuntary attrition of staff that simply cannot excel in the new technology on their own. Each departing staff member can potentially carry away years of hard-learned internal business knowledge – knowledge that cannot be easily replaced by replacement staff.

Critical External Leverage – Companies often attempt to address the previous concern by relying in whole, or in part, on external experts to lead initial implementations with the rationale being that the current staff can either continue working on the legacy technology or can learn by osmosis from the external team. Unfortunately, the external team rarely has expertise in effective knowledge transfer or training. Even when they do have this expertise, the knowledge transfer is often scheduled for the end of the project and is the first item to be compressed or eliminated if the project starts to slip.

Failure to Realize Productivity Gains – IT departments have long been victimized by over-inflated claims and so-called “silver bullet” solutions. New technology, whether because of innate shortcomings or poor implementation, often fails to live up to the hype. Many frameworks and products focus on the underlying engines and frameworks rather than productivity tools like integrated development environments (IDEs) and features designed to reduce administration costs. Amentra is a major proponent of the JEMS stack since the open-source, integrated platform provided by JEMS is reversing this trend. Amentra can help to drive better value for its customers by utilizing this product stack.

Failure to Realize Integration Savings – The first implementation on a new technology platform is often implemented with as few integration points to other systems as possible as part of a proper risk mitigation strategy. Complexities and hidden costs with the platform often arise in subsequent implementations, as an ever increasing number of integration points are built and extended.

Increased Total Cost of Ownership – Any of the previous risks can negatively affect the total cost of ownership and return on investment – the gold standard of business success.

Inappropriate Long-Term Expectation Management – The marketing hype necessary to encourage adoption of new technology platforms can often result in unclear or mismanaged expectations for business users. For example, compare the 1997 vision for Java (it will let us build rich interfaces on the web using applets!) with the 2001 reality of the mature J2EE platform (it will provide core services that allow us to build things like dynamic HTML pages in a more efficient and reusable manner) or the 2001 vision for portals (we can integrate our existing applications just by wrapping them in a portal!) versus the 2006 reality of mature portal platforms like JBoss Portal (we can use a portal to provide a common framework for accessing third-party administration interfaces or for custom-built internal applications; we can perform true data integration other ways). Unfortunately, if over-inflated or inaccurate claims become fundamental parts of a long-term business or IT strategy, disastrous results will follow.

Although these risks are evident in every technology platform migration, they are rarely directly addressed and can often lead to the long-term failure or underperformance of a technology adoption effort and can poison the reputation of a product or technology solution.

3. What was the desired solution?
Amentra worked with the client to formulate a solution that involved two tightly integrated components: a traditional IT implementation with a focus on iterative implementation and heavy business involvement and a parallel mentoring approach that targeted developers, architects, IT support staff, and key business leaders.

Implementation and Architectural Approach

[ Note: At JBoss’s request, Amentra can describe every aspect of the business and technical solution (confidentiality agreements notwithstanding) in exhaustive detail. However, given that Amentra’s proposed innovation is its mentoring model for technology transfer and adoption of the JEMS stack, a brief overview of the technology solution will be provided for context while more attention is devoted to the mentoring aspect. ]

Amentra utilized its industry-leading expertise in J2EE implementation to help the client design a service-oriented architecture based on the JEMS stack. The architecture was specifically designed to provide scalable, reusable business and infrastructural services that would assist in the development of future applications. Amentra’s status as a JBoss partner also gave it additional insight into the future viability of various technology solutions on the JEMS stack, allowing further customization and refinement of the architecture.

A standard logical view of the architecture is provided in the JBoss World Innovation Award Submission
Mentoring Approach

The following section briefly explains Amentra’s mentoring approach as applied to this engagement and will provide a concrete case study of the mentoring process on a JEMS-centric project. The mentoring process is very flexible and based upon the level of the client staff’s experience and the client’s desired end result for mentoring, determined during the initial stages of the engagement. The process behind this methodology can be broken into several high-level steps:

Staff Skill Set Evaluation
Best Practices Opportunity Analysis
Mentoring Topic Customization
Delivery Process Planning
Periodic Review and Adjustment

Staff Skill Set Evaluation
At project inception, Amentra met individually with each member of the technical staff who would be developing or supporting the application in order to establish a basic understanding of the backgrounds and relevant experience of those to be mentored. Amentra focused on obtaining information such as the person’s job description, education and experience, as well as asking each person to complete a self-assessment on their specific business or technology skill sets. It was important that Amentra included support staff as well, as the platform would eventually impact every single person in the IT department.

The resulting feedback received from these individuals along with the end result expectations as described by client management was used to select not only the high-level topics to be covered during the initial mentoring sessions, but to calibrate the level of detail and focus that was targeted for specific topics. For example, even though the development staff all came from Visual Basic 6 and RPG development backgrounds, all of the team members had a solid basic understanding of SQL and basic relational database usage. Identifying this at project inception allowed Amentra to skip classroom training for that area and reallocate the time to discuss less well-understood areas like practical object-oriented design.

Amentra had similar, but more subtle, conversations with key business stakeholders. This allowed Amentra to help IT leadership craft an effective message that emphasized the platform’s strengths, but also communicated the platform’s limitations as well.

Best Practices Opportunity Analysis
As the initial skill set evaluation was concluding, Amentra conducted a review of the client’s business processes, requirements management approach, and/or software development lifecycle processes as appropriate to determine opportunities for refining, augmenting, or reducing process in order to become more consistent with current best practices for the new business and technology environment. In this case, the client had a fairly sophisticated business requirements gathering approach that would work well with the new technology platform. However, the development and testing approaches would benefit from different approaches that better aligned with modern J2EE development. Mentoring in these approaches was thus added to the mentoring plan.

In order to maximize relevancy, Amentra’s mentoring process has been designed to be extremely flexible in its ability to be incorporated within any lifecycle methodology. Amentra has its own iterative methodology for delivering turnkey projects and will utilize this process if the client has not yet developed a process. In this example, the client chose to be mentored on portions of these processes and incorporate these portions into their enterprise direction. Amentra has substantial experience in incorporating its mentoring strategy within very rigid environments for some of the largest companies in the world, including heavily regulated environments like the pharmaceutical, insurance, healthcare, and financial industries.

Mentoring Topic Customization
Using the findings from the staff skill set evaluation and the current status review, Amentra customized a mentoring approach for the client and the team being mentored. The approach highlighted multiple key business processes, technologies, and methodology topics as high-level subject categories for the mentoring effort as listed below. A non-exhaustive list of the mentoring topics covered includes:

Agile Methodology
Requirements Gathering
Test Plan Development
Unified Markup Language (UML)
Introduction to Object Oriented Programming
Basic Java/OO Programming, Section I
Basic Java/OO Programming, Section II
Advanced Java Programming
Java Server Faces (JSF)
Java Messaging Service (JMS)
The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
Database Design
Hibernate
Logging
JUnit and Grinder
Subversion (SVN) Configuration Management
Ant
Maven

Amentra’s extensive experience helped to focus on the most appropriate foundational mentoring topics for initial efforts in order to help prepare the client team for more detailed and nuanced mentoring later in the project.

Delivery Process Planning
Amentra worked with the client’s management team to coordinate the mentoring plan with the overall project plan for the engagement. Like the project plan, the mentoring plan had formal deliverables, timelines, and milestones. The mentoring plan was designed in compliance with Amentra’s following guidelines:

Delivery of mentoring topics were coordinated with the project schedule so that topics relevant to the current stage of a project are covered just prior to and during that stage whenever possible. These topics sometimes spanned different groups participating in an overall mentoring approach and were executed in parallel with these groups by different members of the Amentra consulting team.
Classroom training was always confined to a limited period of time as knowledge retention drops off sharply in long training sessions.
Mentoring material preparation time for extremely customized mentoring topics was considered. However, since Amentra has already created a significant library of mentoring presentations and material, additional preparation time was typically quite small.

Mentoring Delivery
Amentra then iteratively implemented the mentoring plan with the client. Initial iterations for each topic covered involved relatively short (1-4 hour), highly interactive classroom training sessions. This helped establish a baseline among the team for new topics and provided some structure for how the new technologies and skill sets could best be used. Most classroom training sessions had a corresponding set of “homework” assignments for the team to complete individually. This allowed the team to immediately reinforce the learning. Just as importantly, the assignments provided Amentra with immediate feedback on the amount of comprehension that occurred on an individual basis. In one or two cases, training sessions were repeated or extended based on the results of the assignments. In other cases, planned follow-on sessions were eliminated when the team demonstrated immediate understanding of the subjects.

The classroom training sessions were carefully scheduled to be executed immediately before a corresponding opportunity to use the knowledge in practice. One the classroom training established a baseline of comprehension, Amentra immediately targeted follow-on project tasks that helped ensure retention of the knowledge. As the staff attempted to apply their new knowledge to a project challenge, Amentra consultants worked with them individually at various points each day to ensure that they were progressing towards an effective solution, and shared additional, more refined techniques as the staff demonstrated increasing confidence and competence with their new skills. This carefully planned, one-on-one mentoring approach is unique to Amentra and has been critical in helping dozens of clients migrate from legacy platforms to more modern solutions.

It is worth reiterating that Amentra’s mentoring was not just applied to developers. Key business stakeholders and analysts were mentored in the software methodology and requirements gathering sessions. QA staff members were mentored in the test-related topics. Administrators and support staff were mentored in the introductory and administration-related topics. This holistic mentoring approach ensured that all stakeholders were up-to-speed in the new platform and techniques that were being adopted.

Periodic Review and Adjustment
The effectiveness and progress of the mentoring plan was periodically assessed and adjusted throughout the project as Amentra worked with the client to design and implement the application. This iterative approach to mentoring allowed for adjustments to be made as Amentra saw evidence of strengths and weaknesses in the new approaches, creating an optimal learning experience for the project team.

Summary
Amentra’s mentoring model ensured the long term success of the effort by addressing each of the following risks:

Potential Loss of Personnel/Business Knowledge – Amentra’s evangelization and individualized attention helped initially convince the client staff that they would continue to be vital members of the organization after the adoption of the new platform and would continue to be strong contributors to ongoing project success. As the mentoring process progressed, the staff became even more excited about the new skills that they were learning and applying on a daily basis. In fact, the IT department experienced no attrition at all among legacy developers during the project span.

Critical External Leverage – By training the client team in all aspects of product development and administration with the JEMS stack and other technologies, Amentra ensured that the client would be able to support and extend the application without any outside assistance.

Failure to Realize Productivity Gains – Amentra’s critical contribution to the long-term reduction in total cost of ownership was to mentor the team in optimal development practices using the JEMS stack and related technologies. This not only included detailed training in sophisticated development areas like remote application server debugging using JBoss-IDE, but also in software development best practices like designing for reuse, automating integration builds, and test-driven development.

Failure to Realize Integration Savings – Amentra’s vast experience in large-scale enterprise integration helped make this challenge simple for the client. Even before Amentra was formally engaged by the client, Amentra helped the client understand the attractiveness of an integration solution based on a reusable enterprise service bus. Once engaged, Amentra then provided critical mentoring that allowed the client to understand how to extend the integration implementations required for this project.

Increased Total Cost of Ownership – The shared knowledge provided by Amentra in each of the preceding bullets helped to ensure the smooth transition from the legacy technology platform to a JEMS-based platform and guaranteed that the client staff had sufficient in-house expertise to continue to deliver systems efficiently on the new platform.

Inappropriate Long-Term Expectation Management – As noted above, Amentra’s mentoring methodology has evolved over time to include informal mentoring of key business stakeholders specifically to ensure that expectations are properly managed.

Amentra’s innovative mentoring approach to project delivery and the client-consultant relationship has delivered initial project success on the JEMS stack for customers while ensuring their satisfaction with JBoss and Java for years to come.

4. Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss Solutions in the end.
Amentra worked with the client to evaluate the JEMS stack along with several other commercial software vendors and several partial J2EE-based solutions (e.g., standalone portals, standalone servlet engines) for features, adoption costs, expected productivity, support capabilities, and licensing costs. JEMS was the clear winner in each of these categories.

5. What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?
At Amentra’s urging and with full client agreement, JEMS products played critical business and technical roles in the solution. JEMS products are used at every layer of the implementation, including:

Presentation Layer – JBoss Portal has provided the presentation infrastructure for the effort and has served as the interface into several of the reusable services designed for this effort (e.g., authentication/authorization, reporting).

Business Layer – JBoss Server has provided the central hub for the application and hosts the services that comprise the application.

Integration Layer – Hibernate has been used exclusively for all database integration and has drastically reduced the development time for this layer.

With Amentra’s encouragement, the client adopted Eclipse as the IDE of choice and leveraged the JBoss-IDE plug-in as well to help speed development.

Although the JEMS stack played an absolutely mission critical role in the technology stack, its most critical contribution was to allow the adoption of an enterprise-class, fully-supported J2EE solution at a price point that led to quick return on investment. Without this capability, the project might well have languished in the planning stage.

6. What was the overall impact of the project on your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)
Amentra’s mentoring approach gave the client the confidence to include a significant amount of functionality in scope for the first release of the platform. This created several critical and immediate positive benefits for the business:

Reduction in Labor Costs – Within seconds of any student or employee arriving or departing any of the client’s branch locations, the system is notified and recalculates the appropriate labor staffing ratio based on regulations at the state, county, and municipality level. Management in the field is instantly alerted if staffing is too high and can react appropriately. Managers can then react appropriately and with iron confidence to minimize overstaffing. This significantly reduces labor costs, the largest single expense for the client, while maintaining excellent quality of service for customers.

Increased Regulatory Compliance – State, county, and municipal ratios are now automatically calculated based on centrally maintained information instead of being calculated manually at each branch location. This eliminates any chance of inadvertent non-compliance at the branches.

Greatly Increased Operational Visibility – For the first time, corporate management now has near-real-time reporting capabilities on attendance data. This allows for true auditing capabilities from the corporate office, increasing management efficiency in the field and ensuring that every location is meeting or exceeding all appropriate staffing regulations at all times. The use of JBoss Portal as a web interface and delivery method also allows district and regional managers to use the system for self-service reporting when traveling, a critical capability for an organization where some districts cover tens of thousands of square miles.

The savings and operational improvements noted above fully justified the implementation on their own. However, Amentra used their longstanding J2EE expertise to help the client design the system as an extensible, service-oriented platform that can quickly and inexpensively support additional capabilities in future versions such as:

Improved Strategic Reporting – Because of Amentra’s mentoring approach, the client now has the JBoss Portal expertise required to easily deploy existing reports to executive and field management through the JBoss Portal-based interface designed as part of this application. This will also allow the client to further leverage the common authentication/authorization service built during this effort. Further, strategic reports can now be updated on a daily basis instead of a weekly basis due to the ESB-based common data collection infrastructure (q.v. above).

Yield Management Analysis and Improved Pricing Models – Amentra helped the client design the business rules service in a manner that will also support rule-based pricing as part of a future effort. Utilizing more sophisticated pricing methods will allow the client to increase their revenue in the future without a corresponding increase in labor costs. The common data collection infrastructure is a necessary prerequisite for this capability as well, allowing for models that react instantly to changes in student attendance and staffing levels.

Centralization and Portal-Based Delivery of All Applications – The success of this JEMS-based rollout and the low associated development costs have made it likely that more of the applications that are currently executed at the branch will be centralized. This will eventually allow complete central data storage, reducing the computing needs at the branch level and eliminating the existing data protection needs at each branch.

Increasing Automation of Complex Business Processes – The client’s newly acquired ESB experience has enabled them to more aggressively target automation efforts that span systems. This has created a paradigm shift for the client that will likely support years of future projects that generate further incremental cost improvements. Detailed knowledge of existing systems and processes will be equally as important to the success of these efforts as ESB expertise, but Amentra’s ability to retool the development team with ESB skills has ensured that the system knowledge acquired over years of experience at the client has been preserved for the future.

Amentra’s expertise helped the client correctly design the initial services to readily support these future initiatives for very low effort. Amentra’s mentoring methodology ensured that the client developed their own in-house expertise to implement these initiatives with little or no outside support.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
Confidentiality agreements with the client prevent Amentra from disclosing details of savings and expenditures at this time. However, some of the savings created by using JEMS was used to help implement additional services in the service-oriented architecture that will greatly lower future implementation costs for the client.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)
In order to fully leverage the client’s existing infrastructure standards and investments, the following hardware/software stack was used:

Presentation/Application Servers: JBoss Portal, JBoss Server, Hibernate, Windows 2003, on a cluster of 2-CPU Dell Enterprise-Class Servers

Enterprise Service Bus Servers: Cape Clear ESB, Windows 2003 on a cluster of 2-CPU Dell Enterprise-Class Servers

Business Rules Engine Server: Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor

Database Server: Microsoft SQL Server, Windows 2003 on a cluster of 2-CPU Dell Enterprise-Class Server

Business Intelligence Server: Information Builders WebFOCUS on existing hardware.

In order to meet the client’s needs, the application will support thousands of simultaneous users and hundreds of thousands of messages per day from over six hundred branch locations.

9. Did you leverage Red Hat support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?
At Amentra’s suggestion, the client purchased JEMS support to guarantee support, warranties, and indemnification equivalent to that provided by a closed-source platform. Due to Amentra’s support and mentoring, the client has enjoyed the best possible experience with their support – they have not yet had cause to use it at all!

10. Advice to other companies considering JEMS.
The obvious licensing cost and standardization savings resulting from the adoption of professional-grade, open source platforms have traditionally been countered by the perceived difficulty in quickly retooling existing staff to effectively use these platforms. The combination of JBoss’s demonstrated commitment to platform excellence and the proven results of Amentra’s mentoring methodology for retooling legacy developers from COBOL, RPG, VB6 and dozens of other programming backgrounds have overcome this challenge and drastically lowered the entry cost for J2EE platform adoption.

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