Cash check into loan

Victoria Housing authority finds payoff from choice of DBMS first, then platform

The Department of Planning and Housing (DPH) in the Australian state of Victoria is one of the largest government-owned enterprises in the country. It builds schools, hospitals, police stations, public housing units and other government-owned buildings. It also acts as landlord to the tenants of these buildings.

To support the approximately five million people of Victoria -- Australia's second largest state -- DPH employs more than 3,000 people in its 73 offices around Victoria, most of them based in the state capital of Melbourne. The enterprise boasts revenue of approximately $780 million and a property portfolio of over $900 million.

According to Paul Doherty, DPH's manager of information services, the department's evolution to open systems from a mixture of proprietary architectures was prompted by several factors. Key among them was DPH's heavy investment in a major turnkey computing project in the mid-'80s that was to provide for the company's needs until the turn of the century, he said. The system was never delivered, however, and the case ended up in the Victorian Supreme Court. The vendor, Prime Computer, Inc., settled out of court in 1987 for an amount in excess of $1 million.

"But it meant we could start from scratch," said Doherty, who was brought in as part of a new senior IT team. "We decided to look at all the options, including a Unix-based alternative, which very few people were considering back in 1987 for large, mission-critical applications," he said.

Doherty said that the presence of existing systems was a major problem. "Many people said that we should build on the base we already had and introduce more proprietary mainframes. But they were delivering only about 30% of our business need," he said. Doherty noted that there was little connectivity between the platforms from Digital Equipment Corp., Maynard, Mass.; London-based ICL Plc.; and Unisys Corp., Blue Bell, Pa., and most of the systems were still tape-based.

"There was no concept of a corporate database. Not only did data in one system mean something quite different in another, there was also a disturbing trend toward keeping data where it could not be easily accessed," he explained. "Multiple PC systems were springing up, mainly as a result of the failure of the turnkey system, but also because it was taking more than two years to develop new corporate systems."

The new IT team decided to design a completely new system using a relational database. "We wanted to provide a system that would be seamless across the different aspects of the department's operations, would improve service to clients, cut costs and allow us to grow," he said.

EQUIPMENT TO GROW WITH

In 1988, DPH chose the Ingres database from the Ingres Division of The Ask Group, Inc., Mountain View, Calif., running on a Unix platform. At that time, Ingres and arch-rival Oracle Corp., Redwood Shores, Calif., were receiving a lot of publicity in Australia. Both companies' databases were being aggressively marketed, and the push to Unix and open systems was beginning to snowball.

In 1988, Ingres was the name of the DBMS only: the vendor's name was Relational Technology. (The company later changed its name to Ingres, before being acquired by Ask in 1990). Relational Technology had done very well in Australia, matching Oracle in sales and public profile. That situation is still true today, with Ingres installed in nearly as many Unix sites in Australia as Oracle.

"Ingres gave us the portability we wanted, and it provided a good application development environment," said Doherty. "That was important to us," he said, because they wanted to completely redevelop their systems in three years.

Doherty said that the choice of operating system followed the choice of database, and that the choice of hardware followed the choice of operating system. "We needed hardware that could grow with us, and at minimum cost. That proved to be the right decision."

With a user base of 2,500, DPH's estimate of 200 concurrent users was outgrown soon after the systems started to be successfully implemented, said Doherty. "We soon had over 500 concurrent users. We made a fundamental decision to never be tied to a proprietary system again," he added.

Price was also a great motivator for DPH. The annual cost per user in DPH's mainframe environment was more than $7,000, and they were spending more than $21 million a year on mainframes and large recurrent costs, according to Doherty. "Standards became our criterion for purchasing. If a product did not comply with industry standards, we were not interested. We decided that Unix was the way to go."

In early 1988 DPH began implementing a Unix-based client/server architecture. The database was distributed geographically across a number of servers, with all client nodes able to access any server on the network. This took place across an ISDN-based TCP/IP extended local-area network (LAN), connecting all 73 offices.

Hewlett-Packard Co., Cupertino, Calif., won the hardware contract, although development began on Unix systems from ICL and Pyramid Technology Corp., Mountain View, Calif. "Our major development began on ICL, was moved over two days to Pyramid, and just before we went live was moved to Hewlett-Packard in under two days," Doherty said. "That proved to us beyond doubt the portability of products like Ingres in an open environment."

Doherty said that the department's major concern with Unix was the lack of adequate, commercially available systems management tools. "When we went live in early 1989 there were no tools to do things like automatically run batch jobs and do checkpoints and system backups. Nor were there tools to distribute software to our multiple clients, nor software to keep our distributed databases in sync. We had to write them ourselves," he said, adding that it was no small task.

The move has paid off for DPH, though, both financially and in terms of improved productivity. "We have reduced our cost per user to around [$1,400] a year, and we have reduced our operating expenditure by more than [$4.2 million] a year through staff savings, increased controls over public housing maintenance activities and hardware maintenance costs," he said. The new systems have also been largely responsible for reducing rental arrears by approximately $3.6 million annually, improving client service and decentralizing many activities at no cost, he added.

DPH's client/server architecture has been extended across 32 HP Series 9000 minicomputers from Hewlett-Packard, 18 of which are used as servers. The mix also includes three servers from Sun Microsystems, Inc., Mountain View, Calif., as well as more than 1,200 terminals and HP and Sun workstations. The application suite now consists of more than 7,000 programs, with Ingres databases holding more than 1,000 production tables and 13,000 data elements, 25 Gbytes in size.

The largest system is the Property Management System (PMS), which tracks more than 400,000 maintenance requests annually and expedites interaction with maintenance contractors.

This system alone has saved the department millions of dollars, estimated Doherty. "There was an immediate benefit when we introduced the system, through the detection of over-servicing and fraudulent billing by a small group of repair contractors," he said. Before PMS was implemented, repair and maintenance tasks were assigned using hand-written orders, he explained, with sheer volume making them difficult to track.

The new system highlights inconsistencies between work orders and accounts, he said. "We can quickly obtain the maintenance history of every house or apartment, check it against averages and highlight areas for auditors to investigate."

Based on this information, DPH instigated legal action against two maintenance companies, and was awarded more than $A300,000 (US$213,600). Doherty said the overall reaction from contractors has been positive, because they get paid much faster and the standardized work requests give a much clearer description of work required. DPH still runs its DEC VAX, ICL Series 39 and Unisys A15 systems, but they will all be phased out by June 1993. All dumb terminals will be replaced by PCs or Unix workstations by the end of 1993. Front-end systems are currently being rewritten, using Ingres' Windows 4GL.

OPEN SYSTEMS ADVANTAGES