Government ICT Project Goes Live Early and On Budget

HODDESDON, London, UK, - January 26, 2006 (Cyberscience plc)
The Public Guardianship Office (PGO) based in North London, a part of the Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) in England and Wales, manages the assets and income of over 25,000 citizens who are unable through mental or other incapacity to manage their own affairs.

The PGO recently conducted an upgrade of their computer systems with Liberata, the DCA’s IT PFI partner.  As part of this programme, Cyberscience were asked in late 2004 to provide the smoothest upgrade path for the Case Records (CASREC) system running on soon to be obsolete Data General hardware first installed in 1987 with applications developed in-house, to a modern system running on Dell servers.

The original CASREC system was written by DCA staff, using CQCS from Cyberscience and had grown into a complex mission critical system supporting nearly 350 civil servants handling a very large case load. The new system had to be implemented without any interruption and minimum change to the working practices followed by the staff at the PGO.

Cyberscience CQCS has been continuously developed over the last 25 years to be platform and database independent, and to offer superior speed of development with exceptional performance and scalability. CQCS consists of two closely related applications - Cyberscreen the rapid application development language and Cyberquery the most advanced Reporting and Business Intelligence solution for any application database.

Rather than develop a completely new system from scratch with all the attendant delays and problems associated with large projects, the PGO took advantage of the benefits of the application portability that is a fundamental part of the Cyberscience CQCS product. The implementation was achieved ahead of time, on budget and included as a bonus, the automation of several back office processes to provide a turnkey solution.

As well as providing the underlying CQCS software, Cyberscience provided consultancy, certain project management elements and the configuration and provision of appropriate Dell hardware including a hot standby server and replication facility.

The online response time has exceeded all of the PGO's expectations with 350 concurrent users against the previous limit of 50. Overnight batch processing and reporting which previously took up to 4 hours on the old system is now completed in less than 5 minutes! This includes batch updates to the database, the extraction of a large amount of data to interface with other systems and the production of all the CASREC reports.

By leveraging their existing investment in Cyberscience technology, the PGO is able to provide a superior solution with an enhanced GUI user interface, and offer a better service to its users and ultimately its clients.