News

Library Helps Manage Software Assets

• By Linda L. Briggs
• August 3, 2005

At Highmark, a large health insurance company with more than 4 million customers in Pennsylvania, LogicLibrary’s Logidex mapping and discovery engine is helping Highmark better map and manage its software development assets.

Highmark employs about 1,200 developers, analysts and consultants; it’s a large mainframe shop that includes some open systems and a variety of servers.

The company is in the process of redefining its IT strategy to better serve its business, a process that has led to a number of new initiatives, including a component library driven by Logidex. The library will help Highmark govern software development assets and develop the loosely coupled, modular software solutions that are part of a service-oriented architecture. A software development asset library such as Logidex, coupled with strong process control, is the basis for enabling and managing enterprise SOA initiatives.

LogicLibrary Logidex is a software development asset mapping and discovery engine that represents complex enterprise application environments graphically. Assets can include executables such as components, services and frameworks, and software development lifecycle artifacts such as requirements documentation, UML models, and test plans.

The Logidex library creates and maintains an inventory of these assets and their relationships to each other, the company’s business processes and the technical infrastructure. Collaboration support within Logidex work areas allows developers, architects and business analysts to work together within a common context.

According to Steve Parinisi, senior systems consultant with Highmark, the company needed a system that was “easy to customize and configure for the assets that we wanted to capture, since we’re a mainframe shop.” The software also needed to work with open system components, he says. “We use Eclipse-based tools, so we needed a plug-in for that.” Highmark also needed the ability to track assets and their usage.

By connecting information across the enterprise, Highmark’s various development teams can access and share components, source code and best practices throughout the organization, as well as with any outsource partners.

Logidex has made the effectiveness of component reuse obvious, Parinisi says. “It solves some issues we had with [using] a central repository to keep track of reusable components.” Before Logidex, the company had different mechanisms, some of them mainframe-centric, for maintaining component information at departmental and divisional levels. “This brings all that together, so everyone can discover its benefits. We see the potential for its reporting [features] to help us drive in the direction we need to go.”