Technology Solutions: Services

Databases - stores of information that are electronically accessible to many users - are an essential component of most information systems. They allow police officers in a small town thousands of miles away from Washington to draw instantly upon the Department of Justice's vast store of information about criminals. They provide hospitals with immediate information about the availability of organs for transplants. And, they give employees easy and quick access to important company information.

Databases also can be one of the most difficult elements to keep running smoothly. CSC, with decades of experience in building and maintaining huge databases for the military, can build the right database for your needs - whether it is object-oriented, transaction-based, or relational. We can also convert data from your legacy system to a new database, paying attention to all the details that make it an integral part of a modern, distributed business system.

For more information, please contact
Kumait Jawdat,
Business Development.

What We Offer || Success Stories

What We Offer

Design and Development
CSC uses information engineering to plan, define, and develop databases. Our data-centered methodology spans the program's complete life cycle - including planning, defining, standardizing, managing, controlling, synchronizing, developing, testing, integrating, and maintaining all data and functionality within the system.

The focal point for our methodology is a "central encyclopedia" that manages, controls, and synchronizes all data, including data-defining data (meta data). We use several types of models to provide a framework for development. They include an enterprise model, a conceptual data model, a logical data model, mathematical models, applications prototypes, and a physical data model. Once we have completed the development, we have a fully optimized database running smoothly in our system.

Migration and Conversion
Migrating a legacy database from a single mainframe computer to a modern distributed business system may entail many fundamental changes to the database's structure, and converting your data may entail careful coordination with the other elements of your business system.

A significant part of migrating a database and converting its data is the performance of business processes reengineering. BPR streamlines the processes and determines which data are no longer needed. It also shows us how your database should be repartitioned so that access to it can be optimized and maintenance simplified.

Once the BPR is complete, we can begin the detailed design, taking into account such cross-platform changes as word length and high-order versus low-order bytes. After implementing your database and applications, we test them on your new platform. We then begin converting your data, applying many conversion and test procedures, to ensure that the integrity of your data has been maintained.

Success Stories

When the Department of Defense needed to merge a variety of systems in its Worldwide Military Command and Control System (WWMCCS) into a single, integrated, user-friendly one, it turned to CSC. Between 1989 and 1992, CSC's Joint Operation Planning and Execution Systems Implementation Support (JOPES) integrated 28 "stovepipe" databases into a single logical database design. It also added a user interface that seamlessly combined the capabilities of a modern workstation with state-of-the-art commercial mapping software.

An essential part of our success with WWMCCS was our rapid prototyping capability. Working on-site with the Department of Defense, we identified exactly what the agency needed, in part by interviewing more than 1,000 military users of the existing systems. We then built a prototype that allowed us to demonstrate our recommendations to users, and to incorporate suggested changes quickly and inexpensively. We proceeded to build the actual system only when users were satisfied that they would be getting what they really wanted.

On another Department of Defense project, the Global Transportation Network (GTN), CSC is pulling information from many legacy databases and integrating it into a single database that is used by many applications. This state-of-the-art technique, called data mining, is especially important for migrating systems with data that must remain accessible during the transition.