National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
WANG VS COBOL to C++
History: The National Endowments for the Arts (NEA) Grants Management System (GMS), Financial Management System (FMIS), and Automated Panel Bank System (APBS) were unique one-of-a-kind 27-year old legacy systems written in Wang VS COBOL, running on a WANG VS Operating System, and using a WANG VS DMS database. Despite their advanced age these NEA systems were high quality systems with no commercial off-the-shelf equivalents. 
The systems provided administrative support, grant application, financial management, and congressional reporting for the NEA, an agency managing nearly $200 million in federal money.
Challenge: The NEA's administrative system consisted of three major subsystems FMIS, GMS and APBS totaling 656,000 lines of VS Wang COBOL. These systems used the Indexed Sequential Access Method (ISAM) features of the VS Data Management System (DMS) and made extensive use of VS OS subroutines. The NEA legacy systems included twelve hundred 3270 green screens, roughly 900 data tables with 10,000 data elements, and an annual data volume of 4.5 gigabytes. Automated modernization of the NEA administrative systems was a major technological challenge as well as a project management challenge. TSRI provided modernization as well as system integration and deployment services. The NEA provided acceptance testing, deployment testing, and overall program management. FEDSIM provided contract management services.
Results: The three phases of the NEA modernization project and major upgrade were completed in less than two years. TSRI successfully met all goals and mandates, achieving full implementation of the modernized system on time. Of special note was the fact that midway through parallel testing the NEA encountered a WANG hardware system failure that forced an early switchover to the modernized C++ system. Had TSRI not worked so quickly and with such precision, the entire NEA organization would have been shut down for an unspecified period of time.
Download the attachment 'NEA System ConversionV2.ppt'