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Overview
Country: India
Industry: Government
Customer Profile
Office of the Director, Pension was established in 1988 to streamline pension and retirement benefits for government employees of Uttar Pradesh.
Business Situation
The Integrated Pension Management System developed using Microsoft® Access 97 and Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 had become cumbersome. It was difficult to re-code or add new functionality. Maintenance and security related issues also plagued National Informatics Centre (NIC).
Solution
Based on Microsoft recommendation, NIC decided to upgrade the application to Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft Enterprise Library 2.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005.
Benefits
■ Reduces development time by 20 percent
■ Easy to migrate and deploy
■ Improved reporting
■ Better controls and manageability
■ Improves security
| | |“We now have the control to monitor the status of each application from submission to completion from our desktops.”
R. S. Singh, Director, Department of Pensions, Government of Uttar Pradesh
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| | | |Over the years, the pension application developed by NIC for Uttar Pradesh’s Department of Pensions |
| | | |had become complex and cumbersome to manage. As the user interface and business logic was written in |
| | | |the same screen, it was difficult to add new functionality. Over time, the old design did not offer |
| | | |the level of security and reporting available in newer technologies. |
| | | | |
| | | |Microsoft recommended that NIC upgrade the development platform to Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, |
| | | |Microsoft Enterprise Library 2.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005. |
| | | | |
| | | |Using the latest technologies from the Microsoft stable, NIC was able to reduce the development time |
| | | |by 20 percent and at the same time improving the deployment by using technologies such as XCOPY and |
| | | |ClickOnce. Better controls and manageability means less IT administration staff is required. Better |
| | | |security through improved logging ensures that there can be no mismanagement. |
| | | | |
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Situation
Office of the Director, Pension was established in 1988. Up until the early nineties, it would take the department anywhere from two months to years to disburse the benefits to the employees. This was primarily due to lack of infrastructure and the dependence on clerks and officials. There was a large volume of data to manage, verify documentation and only it would advise the treasury department on the benefits due to an employee.
In the early sixties, as India began setting up the government machinery, it took in several thousand employees into the government services. Therefore, in the mid nineties, the workload on the Director of Pensions was colossal; with a large chunk of the officers who had been enrolled in the early sixties into the government – all reaching the retirement age around the same time.
In 1997, to streamline the processes, the department implemented an application, developed by National Informatics Centre (NIC) that computes and initiates the pension payment for a state government employee who is retiring. The application called Integrated Pension Management System (IPMS) Version 1.0 was implemented on Microsoft® Access 97 and Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 at the directorate. The director’s office in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh was equipped with Microsoft Windows 2000 Server along with 16 Windows 98 and Windows XP Professional desktops to automate the office.
By 2000, the application had been implemented at 13 locations of the additional director (Treasury and pension). As solution has processed approximately 85,000 pensioners benefit as of date. Of these 70,000 applications with an approximate value of INR 5 – 9 lakh of each pensioner, have been processed at the director pension’s head office in Lucknow, while the other offices cater to approximately five applications per day. At peak period more than 250 applications were received by Directorate in a month. Once the application is processed, the department of pensions advises the treasury to process the payments.
Since then three versions of this software have been released. The last version was built on Microsoft SQL Server 2000 standard edition and Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0, however this was never deployed.
Technical Challenges
The development team is facing certain technical challenges in adding new functionality as well as maintaining the systems.
■ Increased Complexity: The screens had become increasingly complex with each new release of the solution. Users were comfortable using a user interface that is similar to legacy Foxbase applications that showed all the fields in a single window. Therefore, each time the user interface was developed, the code added new complexity at various steps of the workflow.
■ Code based business logic: The business logic was an integral part of the user interface. This meant that any change in the database schema or fields had to be addressed in the user interface as well as the business logic. Often, this could lead to errors during testing and the process of locating the error would become extremely complex. Each change made at any level of the application had to be hard coded.
■ Could not be deployed remotely: As it was a rich Microsoft Visual Basic application had to be deployed manually at each location. While some of the locations had IT persons present, at other locations, personnel had to travel to deploy the application. The technical team want to automate the process of deployment
■ Maintenance time increased significantly: The duplication was not limited to the application at one location. The changes had to be made across all 12 locations, leading to a need to execute bug fixes and enhancements at multiple locations and servers when a release was made. This added to the manpower needs of the IT department, making maintenance a difficult and time consuming process.
■ Non-standard local language fonts: The user interface in the initial release supported was two languages, Hindi and English; and the intention was to add more languages with subsequent releases. However, as the application used a third party component from the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) that has a repetitive cost based on data input. As this was a non standard font, it had to be stored in the database so that the information could be displayed on the screen. To add another element of complication, the screen was partially in Hindi and partially in English.
■ Reporting issues: There is no centralized automated reporting in place today. The only way an overall report can be generated is when each installation emails its own report, and the results are consolidated. In the long term NIC wants a centralized reporting server from which they can generate important reports which allows them to monitor the effectiveness of the system.
■ Security: Since the application is sensitive in nature as it deals with calculation of pension to be paid and even generates payment orders, it needed to be more secure to ensure no illegal actions could go unnoticed. Currently, the users are created directly in the SQL Server 2000 and users are given DBA privileges.
National Informatics Centre (NIC) also wanted to upgrade the application to include additional features and functionality. In the coming months, the NIC want to offer many more features and enhancements to the IPMS solution. However, NIC was spending more time on looking for solutions to fix the existing challenges instead of focusing on richer functionality.
Solution
At this point, Microsoft India held a two-day review with NIC to understand the problems faced and provide possible solutions.
Microsoft Recommendations:
■ Architecture and development platform: Microsoft recommended that NIC upgrade the development platform to Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft Enterprise Library 2.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Since Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 is no longer in primary support, it’s was advisable to make a new release of the IPMS using newer versions of the development tool.
■ Create a three-tier application: To reduce the complexity, it would be best if the application was created in three separate layers decoupling the user interface from the business logic and the data store.
■ Use Model View Controller Model: In model view controller, business logic only exists in the Model of the system, the View (User Interface) can interact with the model only by the help of the Controller.
■ Microsoft .NET for localization: Using Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 the user interface for the application need not be hard coded into a particular language. Microsoft .NET allows define the developer to create labels in satellite assemblies that hold localized resources. The localized content can be picked up from the satellite assembly and used at runtime based on the user’s language preference. Also, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, supports Unicode, therefore, the data can be stored in SQL Server in Unicode and can be seen in the regional Indian language by the user.
Solution Architecture and Development
NIC used the Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 to Visual Basic 2005 converter to migrate the application to Microsoft Visual Basic 2005. It took about one and half months to develop the solution under new architecture and Visual Basic 2005. “New debugging feature and using XML comments has helped a lot in writing code faster and documents” says Navneet Pradhan, Programmer, NIC.
The IPMS application has been converted into a three tier architecture, wherein the business objects have been created in such a manner, that it can be moved into a service oriented model at a future date. “The application architecture has been created keeping in mind the current and future requirements. We will no longer run into problems while adding new functionality,” says G.P. Singh, Technical Director, Project Coordinator NIC.
To help hasten the development process and transfer technical knowledge, Microsoft brought in The Perfect Future, a Microsoft Certified Partner to help NIC with the application development.
The first step during the development process was to decouple the user interface from the business logic and to use controllers to communicate with the user interface. The controller based architecture provides the technical team with the ability to add or replace new modules in the future.
The team identified the business categories e.g. Pension under which secondary categories such as general pension and family pension were created.
The business logic of each of these modules was created as assemblies, a building block of Microsoft .NET Framework. The business logic was moved into business components so that it contains only the business logic. The user interface invokes the business components via a controller.
Further, the data layer, which was originally hard-coded directly in the business logic was also separated into the Data Access Layer using Microsoft . This is very useful as it simplifies the complex process of computing the pension. It extracts the rules from SQL Server 2005 and uses the formulas to compute the pension after it has extracted rules from the database.
The business components invoke the Data Access Layer which in turn performs the task of querying the database, Microsoft SQL Server 2005. It provides a defined interface for the business components to fetch the data need in the form of a typed DataSet which is an in-memory relational structure with built-in XML support. “The typed datasets are auto generated, therefore, we don’t have to write any extra code to deliver the results of the business object to the user interface,” explains Sanjay Chatterjee, Senior Systems Analyst, NIC.
In the next version of the application, the user interface will be re-written to eliminate the duplicate code, since it will no longer contain any business logic.
The Enterprise Library 2.0 is a part of Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. It provides pre-built application blocks that provide functionality such as logging, configuration and encryption, without the need for the developer to build such libraries. Logging was a key need for the IPMS solution. It requires each activity (performed by a user) to be logged into the database. With Logging Application Block, a functionality in Enterprise Library 2.0 each activity is logged into a row, giving separate values to each action performed.
The user interface for IPMS needed to be bilingual. For this, the team defined the labels only in satellite assemblies which picked up the correct language at runtime based on the user’s preference. The data in the SQL Server is first converted into Unicode and then stored to ensure that it available in the regional language requested by the user. .
Security was addressed by removing the users from SQL Server database and creating custom user ids and passwords that are stored in a separate table. The passwords are encrypted using Enterprise Library Security Application Block for authorization and security caching.
During the testing phase, the technical team at NIC used the static code analyzer of the Visual 2005. This enabled the developers to detect coding and security related issues during the code migration process, thereby reducing the overall cost of fixing code defects.
Deploying IPMS
NIC has used ClickOnce, a technology available in Microsoft Visual basic 2005. ClickOnce is a deployment technology that creates self-updating Windows-based applications. These can be installed and run with minimal user interaction. Once the state wide area network (SWAN) is implemented in Uttar Pradesh, the team will be able to use IPMS as a ClickOnce application.
The pilot has been completed at the office of the director of pensions in May 2006. The roll out across 11 locations in the state currently underway and will be completed by July 2006. Often it was difficult to trace the system that has not been updated with newer version of software. To avoid this situation, ClickOnce technology has been used for software deployment, thereby making it a hassle free process.
Each branch exports its transactions on a daily basis. The exported files are either emailed or uploaded directly on the NIC server using dial-up. The NIC Server uses Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services to generate reports.
Benefits
Highlighting the benefits of the new, improved IPMS application R. S. Singh, Director, Department of Pensions comments, “In 1997, it could take us several months to years to process an application. In 2006, we can issue the authority the day a person retires with timely tracking the retiring employee’s records.”
He further adds, “We now have the control to monitor the status of each application from submission to completion from our desktops.”
Reduces development time by 20 percent
The development time was cut by 20 percent in comparison to Visual Basic 6.0. This is because of features such as the logging block in Enterprise Library 2.0 eliminates a lot of code which was written for the precious versions of the application. “Microsoft 2005 has helped us cut the development time by at least 20 percent,” emphasizes G P Singh, Technical Director, NIC.
Easier to Migrate and Deploy
The migration from Visual Basic 6.0 to Microsoft 2005 was easy and smooth. A routine was written to migrate the data from Microsoft Access to Microsoft SQL Server 2005. The data has also been converted from ISM GIST fonts to Unicode for localization. The entire migration was completed in 20 days with two man powers in normal office timings 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.
Features such as ClickOnce applications and XCOPY, both present in Microsoft .NET applications, make it much easier to install applications in comparison to Visual Basic 6.0. “We used ClickOnce application deployment and XCOPY to cut installation process by 50 percent,” comments Singh.
Generating Consolidated Reports is Easier
Earlier, NIC could not generate reports automatically. It needed reports such as all the cases on which objections have been raised, so that it could inform the concerned department. To generate such a report, data has to be emailed from each of the installation bases and then consolidated at the NIC office. This process is tedious and error prone.
With the implementation of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, The Department of Pensions can generate reports almost in real time. “Currently, we create the reports on a weekly/ monthly basis. However, once the state wide area network is implemented, these reports will be available online in real time,” explains C.P. Lalvani, In-charge, Computer Centre, Department of Pensions, Government of Uttar Pradesh.
Better Controls and Manageability
The entire application across locations is managed by single person from a central location. This has become possible as the logging and audit data is compiled and stored in the database. Each time, there is any problem which will give an exception error. This makes troubleshooting much easier.
The application has been logically divided into the data layer, business layer and the user interface. Changes and additions to the application can be made at a central location and these can be easily reflected in the application. There is no need to make the same change at each level. “We have been able to add control and manageability features easily Microsoft .NET lays a strong foundation for this by using blocks,” comments Singh.
Increased Security
The users no longer have DBA access. Also the Enterprise Library Security Block authorizes and secures access to the database. A detailed log generated for each activity for every user ensures that no mismanagement is possible.
Reusability of Components
The application has been created using the reusability framework. In the future, these will be exposed as services to other applications as well. As the government’s business logic has been componentized, it can be reused for other applications as well.
About NIC
NIC is a premiere Science and Technology (S&T) organization of the government of India in the field of Informatics Services and IT applications, and has been instrumental in steering Information and Communication Technology (ICT) applications in government departments at central, state, and district levels. The e-governance applications developed and implemented by NIC have provided wider transparency in government functions and improvement in decentralized planning and management of projects. To facilitate this, NIC has established a nationwide ICT Network (NICNET) with gateway nodes in central government departments, 35 state and union territories/UT secretariats, and almost all 603 district collectorates for IT services. The government has designated the nationwide computer communication network, NICNET, as the government informatics network.
The Perfect Future
The Perfect Future was founded in 2004 with the mission of enabling customers to use technology innovatively to solve their business problems. This corporate mantra coupled with a continual focus on quality and on-time delivery has made The Perfect Future a preferred company for high end architectural design, consulting, and development. The company has three divisions focused on new technology evangelism, bespoke software development, and product development. Some of its key customers include Tata Steel, NIC, IFFCO, New York Loan Exchange and Microsoft.
Microsoft .NET
Microsoft .NET is software that connects people, information, systems, and devices through the use of Web services. Web services are a combination of protocols that enable computers to work together by exchanging messages. Web services are based on the standard protocols of XML, SOAP, and WSDL, which allow them to interoperate across platforms and programming languages.
.NET is integrated across Microsoft products and services, providing the ability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, secure solutions with Web services. These solutions provide agile business integration and the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device.
For more information about Microsoft .NET and Web services, please visit these Web sites:
msdn.webservices
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LOGICAL VIEW
− User Interface: All Windows Forms and related code
− Entity Classes: Represents each table of database. Contains all the basic operations like (Insert, Update, Delete, Find etc.)
− Config class: Contains all the Microsoft SQL Server and other constants
− Exception Handling and Utility: Contains all utility related methods and exceptions handling mechanism.
− Audit/Log Class: All User Audit/Log handling logic
− Business Objects: Classes contain some business related calculations, relations’ management and logics.
− Database Access: Supports Entity Classes to perform database operations or interact with the database
− Database: SQL Server 2000 with all the tables
| |Software and Services
■ Products
− Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
− Microsoft SQL Server 2005
− Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
■ Technologies
− Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
− Enterprise Library 2.0
− Microsoft
|Hardware
■ Pentium III Xeon, 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM, three 18 GB Ultra 3 SCSI hard disk drives (HDD), 48x CD ROM, 4/8 GB CTD
■ Pentium IV, 1.8 gigahertz (GHz), 512 megabytes (MB) DDR RAM, 40 GB HDD, CD R/W
Partners
■ National Informatics Centre
■ The Perfect Future | |
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© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, .NET Framework, the .NET logo, Windows Server, SQL Server, Enterprise Library, , and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
Document published April 2006 | | |
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
For more information about National Informatics Centre products and services, visit the Web site at: nic.in
For more information about The Perfect Future products and services write to info@ or visit the Web site at:
For more information contact Pension Directorate, Government of Uttar, 8th Floor, Indira Bhawan, Lucknow or call 0522-2287044, 2286633, Fax: 0522-2287080 or visit the Web site at: pensiondirectorate.up.nic.in
Or
National Informatics Centre
4th Floor, Kendriya Bhawan,
Sector-H, Aliganj
Lucknow – 226024 or call 0522-2330403, 2330397, Fax: 0522-2330403
“In 1997, it use to take months to process an application. In 2006, the authority can be issued on the retirement date itself.”
S.B. Singh, SIO and Senior Technical Director, National Informatics Centre, Uttar Pradesh State Unit
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“Currently, we create the reports on a weekly/ monthly basis. However, once the state wide area network is implemented, these reports will be available online in real time."
Mr. V.B. Singh, Director, Financial and Statistical Directorate,, Government of Uttar Pradesh
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Each division contains 5-7 districts. Currently, the solution is being deployed across 11 divisions in the first phase.
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