Bringing the app to the mainframe for modern e-government services

Meet the Customer:

This densely populated American city provides its residents with quick, easy access to all city government services and information. The 311 service is available 24/7, 365 days a year, online in over 100 translatable languages and via Android and iOS apps, and by telephone.

One-touch government services

For this densely populated, large American city to provide millions of residents with the ability to reach out to and interact with city services via live support was truly a massive and forward-thinking undertaking. That’s why the city’s previous implementation of a live city-services hotline, accessible by dialing 311, was celebrated by city administrators around the nation and beyond.

But in this fast-paced city, yesterday’s cutting edge is today’s out of date. And attracting the world’s best from a new generation of tech workers, digital natives, and high-value millennial residents is the lifeblood of a global metropolis. Extending the 311 service to a mobile app wasn’t so much a luxury as an absolute requirement. The residents wanted to use an app to report noise, potholes, and heavy traffic, get a quick fix when heat or hot water goes out, pay parking tickets and other bills, and engage in thousands of unique interactions with the city’s 120 agencies, officers, and organizations.

The problem was how to do this, given the city’s desire to stick with all the advantages of using a robust mainframe. The landscape was littered with failed projects by cities that had undertaken total rewrites to such systems—with subsequent financial, reputational and political costs.

Thankfully, as a longtime user of Adabas, the city had a partner it could turn to in Software AG. CONNX provided a safer, faster, lower-cost, and more secure way forward. CONNX brought digitalized 311 services to any platform—from Web to tablet to mobile—exceeding residents’ demands to have the city’s ear, no matter the time or day.

Data access and virtualization: The mainframe moving at 21st-Century speed

The city’s leaders analyzed what other cities had tried and had no desire to break its amazing 311 hotline, backed by Adabas and VSAM on the backend, and other powerful custom applications used for services throughout the metropolis.

A lot of research led to a clear conclusion: CONNX was a better way to go. It would let the city keep its existing system advantages while offering totally modern iOS and Android apps, giving residents zip code- and address-based, individual access to city services.

Best of all, setup and implementation were promised to be fast, cheap, and successful. “Our success rate on these sorts of projects really is 100 percent,” says Bierman. It was all proved true.

So did the popularity of app-based, e-government interactions. On a normal day, CONNX Web servers are bringing the city’s apps to the mainframe at a rate of thousands of connections an hour.

Ready for IoT—and anything else—in a day

The system has already saved the city millions of dollars in both setup costs and ongoing costs. Automating bill payment and other services adds force multipliers such as real-time services, fewer errors and faster turnaround times, city employees avoiding the drudgery of menial data entry, and residents with a closer connection to the place they already love with a passion.

But what’s really special about what CONNX has brought to the city is its promise for the future.

From smart infrastructure built on an IoT backbone to real-time access to city cameras for traffic routing, the world’s cities are moving towards raw data access that depends on apps.

“If the city wants to implement a new service,” says Bierman, “It can take care of the CONNX part by writing a simple query of about a dozen lines—that it can finish testing in less than a day.” That means the city can go from idea to implementation in as little as a month, limited only by the bureaucracy of studying the impact of the new service.

And as the 311 app connections continue to rise with the success of the city’s e-government services, the only interaction it needs with Software AG is to add licenses and web servers—easily scaling to keep access speedy, costs predictable and low, and people smiling.

Related Posts

Resource schedule 5 MIN read

Nissan Europe: Driving Efficiency Even Faster

Nissan Europe modernizes legacy mainframes with Adabas and Natural, achieving zero downtime, 100% performance gains, and scalable digital manufacturing operations.

Resource schedule 4 MIN read

Powering Operational Resilience in Healthcare Claims 

AmeriBen uses Software AG’s CONNX to process billions of healthcare claims nightly, enabling faster, reliable data flow and supporting long-term operational resilience.

Resource schedule 5 MIN read

AAFMAA: Advancing Cyber Security and Compliance with AI and Adabas & Natural 

AAFMAA turned a cyberattack into innovation. By integrating LLMs + ML into their Adabas & Natural environment, the Association built an in-house anomaly detection engine that delivers real-time insights, smarter threat modeling, and seamless alerting across the org.