From Paper Processing to Web Reporting

Bill Crambo sits back in his chair and reminices about the "old days" before Information Builders and FOCUS became a part of his working life. "FOCUS changed everything for us," he says. "Back in the late 1970s, we had people actually getting sick at their desks, stressed out from working long hours. We were a paper operation then. We had no personal computers, no electronic spreadsheets, and no easy way to get information into or out of our mainframe."

It's been a long and winding road to arrive at where they are today: using the World Wide Web to quickly gather, analyze, and publish information that formerly took months to pull together. Here is Crambo's story – a tale of patience, hard work, and, finally, success – and one that explains much about the evolution of FOCUS technology.

Enlisting Mainframe FOCUS

Crambo is a general engineer in the business division of the office of the Directorate of Military Programs (DMP), part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in Washington, D.C. His group has the daunting responsibility of tracking and coordinating the budgetary and justification processes for active Army construction projects worldwide. The group handles data processing requirements for multiple Army offices involved in the overall development of the construction program. One office, for example, performs cost estimating for all the far-flung construction projects, while another deals with engineering technical reviews. "All this information has to be coordinated and shared with all the other Army offices," he explains.

Two FOCUS systems have evolved for this task: the Construction Appropriations Programming Control and Execution System (CAPCES) and the DD Form1391 Processor systems. CAPCES, which runs on a mainframe, is used by the various offices to develop, submit, and track the Army's military construction programs. The 1391 Processor application controls the budgetary justification process. "Every construction project that is going to be budgeted uses these systems to compile text, costs, code identifications, and other information," Crambo explains. "Ultimately, it is printed into budget books that are submitted to Congress for final approvals."

Bulldozing Paperwork

In the "days of paper and despair," as Crambo calls the pre-FOCUS era, coordinating and cross-sharing information between offices was extremely difficult. "It was a nightmare," Crambo laments. "Even though we had far fewer projects then, moving paper reports around was excruciatingly slow. It could take up to four weeks just to rectify a single set of data, and get a report out to all the various offices."

The team first started using FOCUS in 1977, when they were outsourcing through a GSA teleprocessing service contractor. "Information Builders was relatively small then," Crambo says. "In fact, Gerry Cohen, the founder of the company himself, helped write our Master File descriptions."

Crambo likes to reminisce about some of the FOCUS technological landmarks that were especially noteworthy, in terms of boosting his organization's ability to provide better construction tracking and reporting services for customers. The first, of course, was the introduction of FOCUS and the end of "the paper nightmare." The teleprocessing services contractor set up a dial-in network to access the Corps' mainframe. "Our major customers were able to access FOCUS databases and enter their own information directly," Crambo relates. "Each of them used different databases, which we could then marry using the FOCUS language. All of a sudden, customers worldwide could run their own reports in real time. It was a huge step forward."

Reacting to Change Orders

As a dramatic instance of how important the introduction of FOCUS was, Crambo recalls what happened the day after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president in 1981. "Even though the budget had already been sent to Congress, we were given an entirely new budget to develop," he says. "This was the first really big challenge to the versatility of the FOCUS system."

Crambo and his team were asked to correlate a wealth of new information from all the various offices, then print new budget books. "With FOCUS, each office could now run its own reports on a real-time basis and coordinate changes with other offices," Crambo explains.

"This allowed us to present new budget books to Congress in only three weeks. In the old days, the same job would have taken a year to prepare."

The next giant stride, in Crambo's view, came in 1981 when his organization had completed its own teleprocessing service contract. "Our contract required that CAPCES databases have simultaneous update and reporting capabilities, to allow our customers to enter and report on data simultaneously," he says. "Information Builders rose to the task and provided this capability in the time frame mandated. This was another big boon, because it enabled us to manage all the database information much faster and easier."

Breaking New Ground

By 1996, the Web was rapidly being recognized as the wave of the future, and Crambo had his eye on how to move FOCUS database reports online. "At the time, Information Builders did not have a Web product, and we were being hard-pressed to show that we could produce some reports directly from the FOCUS databases and bring them to a Web page," he recalls. He and his team set about embedding HTML code into the FOCEXEC procedures.

While they were able to build a prototype to show to customers, Crambo warns that this method is not the best way to go. "We recognized immediately the need to move to WebFOCUS, because each report we did was tedious and time-consuming," he says. "WebFOCUS reduces the legacy-to-Web development time down to almost nothing. It also allows us to format the Web pages the way our customers are used to seeing them."

While the majority of Crambo's customers use FOCUS commands to access mainframe data, Crambo sees a revolution brewing with the use of WebFOCUS Developers Studio (formerly Cactus). "We want to take everything our customers are familiar with and put it on the Web in graphical format," he says. "Best of all, we're developing applications that we could never build before. For example, we've put up maps of the country and the world, so that our users can select a location, then drill down to see the number of projects and their size – right on down to the project details."

Appraising Successes

Through the years, Information Builders has been an integral part of meeting the challenges faced by Crambo's busy office. "A major advantage of FOCUS is that it provides an extremely flexible and dynamic environment for handling sudden changes in the business environment," he sums up. "Time after time, we've had new requirements that we've had to respond to quickly. With FOCUS, we've always been able to do that."

Reflecting on the long relationship with Information Builders helps Crambo better grasp the future. "Throughout our history with Information Builders, they have consistently mastered the changing currents of technology," he concludes. "They have helped us to creatively leverage the broader technologies that are evolving."