Located in the heart of Europe, the grand duchy of Luxembourg is a prosperous open society and an important financial hub. The capital city of Luxembourg has a diverse population of 84,000 and employs about 3,200 people.
Moving to Open Architecture
The city of Luxembourg operates its own independent computing center, known as Centre Informatique de l’Etat (CIE), with an IT infrastructure maintained by a staff of 25. Until five years ago, all applications were run on IBM mainframes. Now, development is focused on Java™-based open architectures.
The largest mainframe application is called Pollux, which supports the majority of the residency reporting and administrative procedures. An additional mainframe application is used for customer invoicing and administration of water, gas, and electric utilities. Additional services, including residency registration, require access to the CIE.
Consolidating Services
To deliver a higher level of service, the city created the Bierger-Center, which allows people to complete several official tasks at a single location. This move has essentially rescued citizens from a tangle of bureaucratic red tape.
Instead of time-consuming trips to different city offices, residents now go to the Bierger-Center for everything from changes of residence, applications for identity cards, passports, and tax reporting forms, to parking permits. Luxembourg’s national government also has offices in the center to handle business with other agencies.
IT consultants have developed new front-end composite applications to simplify the various procedures for Bierger-Center employees. Guided through every transaction, staff uses detailed checklists to apprise citizens of their rights and obligations, so they can take care of business in only one trip.
Three-Step Evolution to E-Government
Early on, reorganization of city services was divided into three phases:
- Consolidate numerous tasks at service windows, supported by new menus and application modifications.
- Set up standardized service desks.
- Create web-based applications for residents to handle registration issues online.
An important project goal was seamless integration of user interfaces with single log-on to the various applications. And extensive automation was planned to make the workflow at the service desks faster and more accurate. But the IT staff knew the biggest challenge would be integrating the 3270 applications of the CIE and Pollux system with the remaining applications.
Perfect Complements: Attachmate and BEA
The city of Luxembourg IT service center decided on BEA® WebLogic for the integration platform. And because they were longtime Attachmate® EXTRA!® terminal emulation users, they looked to Attachmate for mainframe integration expertise.
“Attachmate had so many advantages that we didn’t even need to look at other options,” said Guy Breden, deputy manager of resident services and IT manager at the service center. “Attachmate allowed us to access the mainframes without changing applications,” he said. “In case of difficulties with the migration, we can return to our previous applications at any time. We really appreciate the peace of mind this gives us.”
Extending Mainframe Functionality with Reusable Objects
Implementation was carried out by an external development partner, ABC Luxembourg, with assistance from the legacy integration team at Attachmate. Users can now work with a web interface, making the legacy applications completely invisible.
The Attachmate solution is a good fit for the city as it moves forward, because phase three of their evolution to e-government will also require mainframe access. In fact, the mainframe integration is currently implemented as a prototype that has been tested and presented to users. According to Breden, “the prototype was well-received and is expected to achieve a time savings and efficiency improvement of over 50 percent.”
A Win-Win: Cost Savings and Improved Service
Attachmate and BEA Systems have delivered the ideal tools for creation of the new portal system at the Bierger-Center. And Attachmate solutions were key to the successful integration of the city’s critical mainframe applications and Pollux application into the BEA WebLogic environment.
The new system gives Bierger-Center employees improved workflow with unified applications for all types of official procedures. Productivity has already improved and better reliability is projected for all tasks. The end result is twofold: cost savings for the city and improved service for citizens.
About Attachmate Integration Solutions
The Attachmate Verastream product line accelerates the reuse of legacy applications in service-oriented architectures. This suite of solutions provides a complete range of mainframe, web, and desktop modernization tools—from basic rejuvenation to customized presentation and sophisticated high-performance integration.
Verastream-generated services can be mixed, matched, and reused selectively to extend legacy functionality to new users or new composite applications. No code changes to legacy applications are required, so you can avoid risk while speeding up application integration, application development, and workflow enhancement.