Greenland License Control

Sirius IT has been in charge of conversion, modernization and redesign of the central database complete with applications in connection with a general renewal of the application environment in Greenland’s Fisheries License Control ( GFLC ). The system is used by approximately 25 employees every day.

GFLC is an institution under Ministry of Fisheries, which is under the Government of Greenland, who handles affairs such as registration and control in the fishery territory. This territory primarily includes commercial fishery and to a lesser degree leisure-time fishing. The Ministry of Fisheries assists in law preparing work , issues rules, administers the fishing resources and draw up statistics.
Today GFLC has approximately 70 employees.

Relation

The cooperation between Sirius IT and GFLC stems from a long cooperation with the Danish administration in the same area; Ministry of Fishery in Denmark.

GFLC has profited by Sirius IT´s many years of expert knowledge within this area. At the same time they have adopted the existing subsystems and in this way avoided expensive time for new development.

Background

For many years GFLC’s main job has been to issue licenses to, and control the catch of shrimps. Since then the claim for control has exploded and GFLC has had to realize the need for a thorough renovation of the system.

With the new system GFLC wanted to simplify the use of the system and reduce the expenses for maintenance. In addition, parts of the existing data model were outdated and therefore it was necessary with a complete redesign of some of the subsystems.
There has been attached great importance in making the system user friendly and easy and intuitive to operate.

Challenges

Since the development of the system took place in Denmark it was very important to establish good lines of communication – both on a technical and personal level. For the developers there was established a stable VPN-connection complete with remote control tools, while the personal contact was ensured by day-to-day meetings, reviews and presentations both in Denmark and Greenland. Sirius IT has from the beginning of the project taken care the of support and maintenance of the system. This service also takes place from Denmark with the help from VPN and remote control tools.

The Fisheries License Control’s existing system required a thorough design examination, since the system had been extended over several years as the legislation changed. At the same time we removed central parts of the system and replaced them with subsystems from the Ministry of Fisheries in Denmark. This made big demands on developers and system architects. As part of the project analysis it was seen as an advantage to gather information from a number of authorities to a central database. Hereby increasing the quality of data and considerably simplifying the routines and procedures between the authorities.

The Solution

Great importance has been attached to the following conditions :

• Effective Administration
• Central Maintenance
• Scalable
• Performance

The system has been converted to a web based platform, which have made the system more accessible, while the maintenance expenses at the same time has dropped considerably. These changes has created big changes for the users concerning the system’s look, navigation and routines.

The new design of the data model has eliminated redundant data and has made it easier for the users to keep the general view. The new data model has deliberately been constructed more dynamically, so as to take the frequent changes in the business procedures, which often happens within the authorities, into account.

Oracle has been chosen as the strategic platform and therefore the system has been developed on this background with the belonging development tools. These tools make it possible for the developers to create tailor-made withdrawals from the database, or for instance a new functionality for the user interface very fast, instead of coding for several days as was done earlier.

Roles

Sirius IT´s consultants among other things manage the following tasks:

• Project management
• Technology Consulting
• Determination of work oriented wishes for solutions
• Drawing up the frames of technology for the specific solutions
• Preparation of demand specification for the new subsystems
• Database administration on the implemented applications
• Design and implementation of datawarehouse solution

Tools

• The new fishery system is developed in Oracle Developer 6i ( Forms and Reports)
• Maintenance of the database ( Oracle 8 ) is primarily handled with Oracle's Enterprise Manager
• Datawarehouse presentation developed in Discoverer
• Novell BorderManager VPN was used for the connection between Denmark and Greenland
• NetOp from DanWare was used for the remote control of servers from Denmark

Technology Used by the Users

The communication between application and database is handled by Oracle Forms Server 6i, which automatically transforms the Oracle application to Java application. There is no need for any special software on the users machine, since the application is executed in an ordinary Internet Browser. It’s therefore possible to handle support, administration and maintenance of the system centrally.