Visual COBOL helps Ministry of Finance for Cyprus raise its performance

MINISTRY OF FINANCE

How modernization made the difference for Ministry of Finance

Improvement of 50% in application performance

Time to delivery accelerated by 30%

Reduced business risk through use of a modern application platform

New web-based UI for its business users

Improved data reporting

About Ministry of Finance INDUSTRY: Government COUNTRY: Republic of Cyprus CORE APPLICATION: Tax management

Ministry of Finance, Inland Revenue Department (IRD), enforces the direct tax legislation and the Double Tax Agreement concluded between Cyprus and other countries. It ensures that the public pays its taxes and that a quality service is provided to the taxpayers.

Over 25 years ago, Ministry of Finance developed a system, used by 600 civil servants, for managing its tax-related functions. This includes a method for capturing the profile of each tax payer in Cyprus and a comprehensive process for tax collection.

For years the application for managing tax-related functions worked well. The hardware and software infrastructure had now become unsupported, posing a huge business continuity risk to its operations. Its technical limitations made it difficult to improve functionality, yet new business objectives and government regulations had to be met.

The decision was made to update the system and various options were explored. With over a century of business intelligence captured within the system, re-writing the application would be expensive and risky. The better option was to revamp it so that minimal changes could be carried out and the mission critical functionalities could remain untouched.

The challenge – rewrite or revamp?

Moving to a .NET environment

The 25-year old COBOL application was easy to move onto a modern application platform. Ministry of Finance can re-use its existing COBOL logic within a .NET architecture, with minimal change and risk.

Moving to the new .NET platform has greatly improved reliability and scalability. The new, agile environment can scale well beyond the capacity required and a performance improvement of 50% has been recorded for its nightly batch runs.

Reporting functionality has been enhanced and extracting information from these business

systems is much easier than before. Application security is better, through integration with Microsoft’s Active Directory, making it easier to comply with continual regulation changes, and delivering new application auditing capability.

With a focus on mitigating business risk, this project has delivered a fully maintained and supported environment. Ministry of Finance is now able to adopt industry-standard software development tools and modern application architecture, resulting in future-proof applications.

CHOSEN TECHNOLOGY: Visual COBOL for Visual Studio, COBOL ServerPREVIOUS TECHNOLOGY: Micro Focus Object COBOL Developer Suite (OCDS)

Redeeming the value

We are able to deliver higher quality applications, faster, thanks to the superior testing and debugging tools available in Visual COBOL. On average, applications are delivered up to 30% faster than before.

Visual COBOL enabled the teams to work closer together even though they each have quite specific expertise. The integration between Visual Studio and Visual COBOL allowed the development teams to work in harmony from the start, improving their time to delivery by 30%.

Mr. Costas Agrotis

Director, Information and Technology Services for Inland Revenue

Your path to innovation starts here

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Read the complete Ministry of Finance success story in the case study.

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