Answering agents' questions like these is an around-the-clock proposition for Liberty National Life Insurance Company, which has provided life insurance for more than 100 years in the southeastern United States. Read on to see how Liberty National met the challenge of providing current, accurate information to 100 district offices and 2000 agents serving more than 2 million active premium-paying customers.

One small shop—one big task

Liberty's insurance agents had a few options when they needed information:

• They could ask district management to access customer data using an office PC with a terminal emulator.
• They could call customer service in Birmingham, Alabama.
• They could search the monthly printout of client information.

Each option had drawbacks. With an average of 20 agents and only one PC with terminal emulation, getting a quick answer from the district office was difficult. Customer service in Birmingham was available only from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Printed material could be up to a month old. Agents needed quicker access to current client information on a 24/7 basis, and Liberty's small mainframe shop was charged with finding out how to do it.

Like the staffs at many CICS shops, Liberty's IS team possesses a wealth of COBOL and CICS experience and relatively less experience with newer Web technologies. Liberty's IS department has only 20 programmers, half of whom have more than 20 years of experience. "I started writing CICS programs when CICS was brand new," says Wes Gray, VP of Information Development and a 30-year veteran at Liberty.

However, the size of Liberty's shop doesn't limit the breadth of its responsibilities, "We do it all: maintenance, new development, everything," said Gray. "We do our own development and don't buy a lot of software."

Basic requirements: "Simple, maintainable, and use our existing staff"

Gray and his staff initially identified three clear requirements. First, they wanted a simple solution. As Gray said, "What I was trying to provide was data to my agents without a lot of the flashy stuff. I wasn't trying to sell a policy." The solution wouldn't require a complex, sophisticated user interface because agents needed read-only policy information.

Second, the solution needed to be easily maintained. This meant keeping the solution at a technical level that made sense. "I didn't want to add a complex layer of Java code on top of a complex CICS transaction," said Gray.

Finally, Gray wanted current staff to develop the solution. "I didn't want to retrain my staff. If I didn't use my existing COBOL programmers, I'd have to come up with additional staff to do the work."

Gray and his staff looked at two options: transferring files to another Web server or keeping everything in CICS.

Transferring to another Web server:

Gray knew that he could make mainframe files available from the Internet by transferring them to an additional Web server (FTP). However, Gray and his staff immediately recognized the drawbacks to this approach. Their legacy transactions in CICS allowed calculation of items like cash values and loan payoffs at inquiry time for one policy at a time. If data was moved to another server, the values for all the policies would have to be calculated prior to transfer, a step they estimated would add an additional one to two hours of processing time. And even more time would be eaten up during file transfer.

Gray could circumvent this issue by rewriting very complex quote modules, but it wouldn't be simple. He also worried about issues of integrity and maintainability. "If you have the same data in two places, it doesn't stay the same very long," said Gray.

Keeping everything in CICS:

The Liberty team also investigated Web-enabling their native CICS transactions using CICS Web Support (CWS) and the 3270 Bridge. "We knew that the newer releases of CICS were going to have a Web interface piece," said Gray. After installing CWS on Transaction Server (TS) 1.3, Gray and his team began testing. Early results were disappointing. "The basic bridge output was just a little bit crude to present," said Gray.

However, the possibility of keeping everything in CICS, where Gray and his team had years of experience, remained appealing. "It was a no-brainer to choose a solution that let us use our mainframe files," said Gray.

Adding WebTek tools

To improve the output from CWS and the 3270 Bridge, Liberty decided to bring in H&W's WebTek. "We had two other H&W products: SYSD, which we've had for years, and Wizard Mail, which we've had very good success with."

Enhancing CWS with WebTek

WebTek works with CWS to improve security, maintenance, and the output of bridged or Web-aware CICS applications. Gray and his team felt that CWS with WebTek met their requirements. First, CWS provided the simplicity they sought by allowing them to continue to use their stable CICS transactions without installing additional servers or platforms. Second, WebTek provided the missing tools that allowed Liberty to enhance security, ease maintenance, and improve output. And finally, existing staff could develop within core competencies of COBOL and CICS. No additional staff or formal training would be needed.

How they did it

Liberty used IBM's 3270 Bridge to Web-enable the majority of its CICS transactions. The 3270 Bridge converts 3270 screens to HTML without requiring significant change to the legacy CICS transactions.

Before starting, Liberty made a few security enhancements to the legacy CICS transactions to enforce company policies on what agents were allowed to view. Liberty also accounted for a few 3270 Bridge limitations, such as checking for Term ID.

These changes took developers anywhere from two hours for simple transactions to two days for the most complicated. However, once the changes were complete, the time spent bridging, standardizing HTML output, and providing the Web presentation was minimal. According to Kyle Corley, Senior Programmer Analyst at Liberty, "Once you have your transaction set up to go out to the Web, using the bridge takes negligible time."

Leveraging transaction-based security

Liberty further enhanced security by leveraging existing CA-ACF2 security using WebTek's URL Control Table (UCT). The UCT allows developers to create a mnemonic (an indirect reference) for each CICS transaction and assign security restrictions to it. Liberty created a mnemonic to require agents to enter their CA-ACF2 user ID and password information before accessing any transaction. When agents attempt to access a transaction, WebTek provides a signon screen where they can enter their information. The CICS transaction then uses that information to restrict agents to their own client information.

Standardizing the presentation

Liberty used WebTek's Theme Manager tool to standardize output from the 3270 Bridge. Theme Manager wraps HTML output from the 3270 Bridge with additional HTML. This "theme" can contain corporate identity items such as logos, hyperlinks, and graphics. Liberty created the theme using Microsoft FrontPage and then uploaded it to CICS using WebTek. The theme and 3270 Bridge output are then merged at run time.

Liberty used one theme for all transactions to provide consistency and allow for global changes. WebTek allows developers to apply themes based on user ID or group ID, or by transaction. Currently, Liberty is successfully bridging seven CICS transactions and has plans to bridge even more.

Adding features with Pipeline

Liberty used WebTek's Pipeline tool with certain transactions to provide more sophisticated Web features such as scrolling. Pipeline provides a Java, Visual Basic, C++, and C## interface to Web-aware CICS applications. This allows direct access to CICS data from Web application servers, Windows programs, Java programs, and so forth. Web-aware CICS applications build and send Web output (HTML, XML, etc.) using IBM's EXEC CICS WEB and DOCUMENT commands.

Liberty built an HTML form using more advanced HTML and a Java applet. When agents submit a request from the form, Liberty's applet communicates with an applet provided by WebTek to send the request to a Web-aware CICS application. The CICS application receives the request, builds a response, and returns it to the Pipeline's applet using EXEC CICS WEB commands. Liberty's applet receives the response from Pipeline's applet and populates the form with the CICS data. Web-aware applications can pass data in many formats, including XML. Liberty determined that its best strategy was using a form and passing a data stream.

What they've achieved

Agents can now access current client information at any time from the office or from their own home PC. By choosing the CWS/WebTek solution, Liberty met the project requirements for simplicity, maintainability, and use of existing skills.

Make it simple to maintain

Because everything is in CICS, Liberty has no additional servers or gateways to maintain. By using CICS as the Web server, Liberty's experienced staff can easily maintain the transactions. "Maintenance-wise, if I make a change to a file in CICS, I don't have to worry about changing another file for Internet access," said Gray. "The biggest thing was being able to use my mainframe databases."

Use existing skills

Liberty implemented using existing COBOL/CICS staff. "I've been able to come in and use my mainframe files, use my existing programming staff, and give a screen to my agent that has the look and feel of a PC application," said Gray. "Had I gone the download route, I would have had the expense of getting Java training for my programmers."

Quick results and outstanding ROI

Liberty Web-enabled its CICS applications quickly. According to Gray, "I used four different CICS programmers to create eight display transactions in record time." As agent access continues to evolve, Liberty has plans to provide transactions for customer access at the beginning of the year.

Gray hopes that the CWS/WebTek solution will reduce the number of calls to customer service. He also hopes to reduce or even eliminate the monthly practice of printing client information for the company's agents. According to Gray, the information tends to be presented in a shotgun-approach: "Here are all your clients and everything we think you might want to know about them." Once all districts are up and running with the Web-enabled transactions, they will no longer need the printouts.

Conclusion

By Web-enabling its proven legacy CICS transactions using IBM's CWS and H&W's WebTek, Liberty effectively leveraged the power of CICS and the experience of its existing staff to achieve quick results. In the process, Liberty eliminated the time and expense associated with adding new staff, rewriting legacy applications, retraining developers, and purchasing additional servers. Liberty now provides current client information to agents around the clock.