IGS Informatik für Sozialversicherungen

The Computer Science Institute for the Social Insurance (IGS) wanted to replace its host-based informatics system for 16 cantons and the principality of Liechtenstein by an application landscape based on modern technology. adesso Schweiz AG was assigned to develop the conceptual technical basics.

The VISTA project’s aim was to realise a highly integrated and expandable solution for handling the social insurance business of 17 clients. The following business processes had to be handled: AHV/IV-pensions (including added values, health costs, and compensations), disability insurance, reparations salary, family compensation fund as well as the administration of employer/employee contributions. The system had to be applicable for smaller organisations as well as for large institutions; and it had to incorporate the canton-specific laws. All data of the legacy applications had to be transferred into the new solution.

The first step in developing the technical specification was the modulation of the business process together with experts. Functionalities of the future applications were derived from existing business processes. Finally, the application landscape had been configured.

In a next step the business processes were visualized using prototypes of the user interface. The interface had been fully implemented in order to impart a full view on the functionalities of the future applications.

Based on the technical requirements and the internal marginal conditions, the proposal for the architecture of the platform was developed. Because of the complexity of the technical data and the requirement to support the administrators in process management, a Windows Rich Client had been chosen as the representation level. The three-layer architecture is on server-side operated on a Unix platform.

A critical aspect of every replacement project is the migration of legacy systems into the new solution. Based on a data conversion strategy the general and detailed concept has been developed. The necessary procedures for analysis, clearing, completion and migration were defined. The detailed mapping of legacy data in the data model had already been defined and documented in the specification phase.

At various points of time during the project prototypes were tested in critical areas. Primarily, the data migration of VSAM and DB2 data had been realised and performed under concept with two prototype implementations.