Case Studies
Object Oriented Consulting for a Major Utility Company
The successful delivery of this project was an important first milestone.
The Challenge
The successful delivery of this project was an important first milestone for this corporation's changing IT department. They had been chartered with implementing a new model for the delivery of agile and adaptive technology solutions, and this first project would serve as a critical proof-of-concept for this model. If successful, it would empower them to take that model to the rest of the enterprise.
This new application delivery model was predicated on an iterative software development methodology that relies heavily on the use of object technology. This strategy would improve developer productivity, reduce solution time to delivery, mitigate system interface complexities, design flexible and adaptable system architectures, and dramatically improve the quality of the deployed solutions. This IT group needed to show it could now deliver these benefits outside the incubator provided by a single project environment. To meet this challenge, they re-structured themselves around three key elements: project management, application architecture, and object technology. Each of these "centers of excellence" would focus on enhancing and enabling its own core competency. As project needs would arise, each center would then conceptually partner with the others to define and deliver the requisite solution to the business units.
The Solution
One of the first projects to be tested in this new model was a system that manages the work crews and equipment needed to make vital repairs to its transmission and distribution network, and, in particular, its overhead power lines. Before the development of this system, field operations managers had to manually (and inefficiently) track schedules, crews and equipment. This project was tasked to deliver an application to ease that burden and provide a common web-based solution to all service centers that could be maintained centrally to allow for simpler maintenance and modification. This system was designed to automatically update employee calendars and job scheduling requirements, track overtime, track equipment availability, make initial crew assignments, and support a host of other key service center functions.
Partnering with this client and these "centers of excellence", Xede played a critical role in delivering this initial application. The solution utilized Netscape Enterprise Application Server (NES) and JRun to serve HTML across several Intranet and Extranet applications. The application used Java Servlets, a command-oriented architecture, and JSP to generate dynamic HTML and interact with the business components for business processing. After successfully implementing several projects, the Object Technology "center of excellence" with Xede's assistance also built a tool composed of several reusable Java software components that had incrementally been developed and tested on previous projects. Today, the object technology group can focus on the customers’ business and use this reusable, out-of-the-box tool to handle authentication, mail services, persistence, logging, and various other utility type services. This tool has allowed this group to implement functionality in shorter time frames and increase its capabilities and robustness as business requirements mature. Its components also insulate the business domain, minimizing the impact of architectural and technological changes.
Example Role: Object Technologist
One of Xede's key resources on this project served as an Object Technologist. Her primary role was to partner with other object technologists and strategically select customers to plan solutions that met the business and strategic goals of the company overall. This involved modeling the business domain (including the assignment engine), identifying areas for reusability, coding new business and process objects, and testing. She played a key role in building several of the software components that populated a re-useable repository. Her extensive experience utilizing object technology led her to encapsulate implementation details and complexities through clear and simple public interfaces. She led CRC (Class-Responsibility-Collaborator) sessions introducing object technology to other team members. She was also asked by client management to participate in the design and code reviews for other projects to help them better adopt object technology and reap the inherent benefits it has to offer.
