Food for thought

Pro

1 April 2005

The story of the vexed, nay disastrous, mismanagement of Irish agriculture in the 19th century is a familiar one to anybody who has braved an Irish school education. Back then it took a full scale famine to move the government of the day to intervene in the market so that the starving peasantry could have some hope of obtaining food.

Fast forward 150 years and all has changed utterly. Subsistence farmers have disappeared from our landscape, agriculture and food produce is a major export industry, Trevelyan’s Corn is now a line in a song heard at major sporting events and Irish farms are now strictly regulated by the government in line with the tenants of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

The Department of Agriculture and Food is the body that co-ordinates all the intervention schemes allowed by the CAP, including direct payments to farmers and market support payments that go to the industry in general. The Department also controls the disease-control programs run by several veterinary offices around the country and has to co-ordinate the overall response to any animal-disease outbreaks that threaten the health of Irish livestock or the industry in general.

For a country like Ireland, where agriculture is still a major industry, the Department of Agriculture and Food is one of the most important, dispensing an annual amount of about EUR3bn to recipients at all levels of the food industry.

The man in charge of the department’s overall IT effort is Phillip O’Reilly, who holds the title of Assistant Secretary in the Department. For somebody whose background is in IT, it’s an unusual job title, but it reflects the importance of the IT team to the work of the Department.

‘Up to three years ago, there wouldn’t have been anybody at that level responsible for IT,’ he admits candidly, ‘so that was a signal in itself that IT was to be taken seriously here’.

O’Reilly is reluctant to give an exact figure for the size of the department’s IT budget, but says that in terms of the amount spent on in-house human resources in IT, it makes up less than 5 per cent of the overall resources of the department.

However, over the past four or five years, the amount spent on IT has been larger than usual because, as O’Reilly puts it: ‘we had a little catching up to do’.

The history of IT in the Department is long and varied. The first use of computing was in the old Land Commission, which was subsumed into the Department of Agriculture decades ago. Those of you who remember from your school days learning about the various schemes set up by the British regime to allow tenant farmers to buy out their holdings with the help of Government supported annuities, may be surprised to learn that some of those annuity payments whose origins date back to the 19th century are still being made in the 21st.

Retired

The computer used to calculate and process those annuity payments is of fairly old vintage itself: an IBM System 390 mainframe running the VSE operating system. One of two IBM mainframes still on the Department’s premises as this interview was being carried out (in mid October), it was just due to process its last batch of payments before being retired, according to O’Reilly. However, the Department will retain its other, slightly more modern MVS mainframe for the foreseeable future.

‘We still have a lot of legacy systems,’ says O’Reilly, ‘dating back to a time when you could only justify IT for extremely repetitive functions that were performed in significant volumes. The Land Commission, in terms of the money it was spending, was a serious bank in national terms at the time’.

The first big change in the use of computing took place when Ireland joined the EU, or the EEC as it then was, in 1973. ‘Before that, the Department of Agriculture would largely have been a policy based department,’ says O’Reilly. ‘When we acceded to the EU it became an operational department involved in the administration of EU schemes, monetary compensation, export refunds and so on.’

The next big landmark occurred in the early 1990s, when Ray McSharry as European Agriculture Commissioner implemented a series of reforms. Up to then, huge sums of money were being dispensed to a small number of big customers such as large exporters and meat processors, according to O’Reilly. These payments were for market support, intervention and export refunds, to keep the market buoyant.

The effect of the McSharry reforms was to redirect money straight to farmers. ‘That was a big shift,’ says O’Reilly, ‘because suddenly the department went from having a small number of customers to having every farmer in the country as a customer. As well as that, each farmer may have been eligible to receive payments under numerous different schemes. It wasn’t just a case of one payment to each individual farmer. We could be giving ten different payments to one farmer in any given year’.

The next big reform was Agenda 200 which changed a lot of things in relation to CAP (Common Agricultural Policy). Looming on the horizon now is the mid term review of CAP which promises another complete transformation. The word ‘decoupling’ is now being mentioned with great frequency in news bulletins.

The idea is that direct payments to farmers will no longer be tightly linked to food production. The extent to which this decoupling will take place will be down to each country, but it will likely mean a new set of applications for the Department to come to terms with.

IT department

O’Reilly is in overall charge of an IT group comprising some 200 people. It is divided into five sectors.

One looks after infrastructure including the data centre, networks and comms, desktop PC support, helpdesks and so on.

Consultancy Services is the central services division which covers central co-ordination for e-government, IT skills and training, IT architecture and the programme office — which keeps track of the overall state of IT projects.

Another section supports the internal administration systems, such as the Departments financial system based on SAP, the PeopleSoft Human Resources system and internal document tracking systems.

The fourth and fifth sectors support those IT systems that deal with external customers — namely farmers and food manufacturers. These look after the systems that administer direct payments to farmers in the first instance and market support intervention and export refunds in the second. They also handle all the animal health programmes and systems to monitor the movements and traceability of animals. (See panel)

As well as the mainframes which also run the Department’s vital Cattle Movement Monitoring System (CMMS) the Department also has a legacy of standalone Nixdorf systems in its network of District Veterinary Offices. These run proprietary software that manages disease-eradication programmes aimed at stamping out bovine TB and Brucellosis. In its head office in Dublin, it has a SAP financial system on an IBM RS/6000 with IBM’s version of Unix, namely AIX.

Dotted around here and there are other SQL databases and Windows servers. It’s a hotch potch and the Department is trying to bring some kind of unified approach to it all.

It has decided to implement a three-tier architecture based on Unix (HP’s Tru 64 implementation) on the server end, with the Java J2EE development environment being used to write new applications that will run on the Oracle IAS application server. These can then be deployed to users on a variety of systems from desktop PCs to handhelds.

However, O’Reilly is reluctant to throw perfectly adequate systems out just for the sake of standardisation. There are three issues driving IT deployments and he lists them according to the response time needed. ‘One is of immediate importance,’ he says, ‘one is medium term and one is long term’.

Drivers of importance

The drivers of immediate importance are for systems that need stability and security, he maintains. For example the CMMS system is vital because it tracks the movement of each individual cow across the country from birth to slaughter. ‘If the CMMS goes off the air, it closes down the entire meat-processing industry. Cattle just can’t be slaughtered.’ Clearly, stability is important here and that is why he has been reluctant to move the CMMS off the mainframe where it has been operating quite effectively for some time.

‘Security is important too,’ he says, ‘because if we have a security breach, even if nothing happens, we could be liable for serious penalties from the EU. You can’t even countenance that’.

The second set of drivers, the medium-term ones, are the urgent business needs which have to be met, such as changes to payment schemes that occur over time. ‘When these changes are made, we have to change our systems so that they are ready on time for that money to go out,’ says O’Reilly. ‘I could have told you three years ago that the payments going out today would be going out today. That’s a known from year to year.’

The long-term drivers require the Department to position itself to have maximum agility and ability to react quickly to sudden changes. For example, in the case of a disease outbreak such as was experienced recently with Foot and Mouth disease, the Department might have to implement a ‘purchase for destruction’ scheme at very short notice.

For the future, the department is putting a lot of faith in mobile applications. ‘Mobility is very important to us because we have a lot of field staff doing inspections, farm visits, factory visits and so on,’ said O’Reilly. ‘At the moment we use a lot of SMS messaging, but as time goes on we want to be able to offer access to any information remotely that our agents or customers require and allow them to carry out transactions on the spot.’ The J2EE allows for such ease of deployment and as mobility improves, the Department will be able to deploy applications to handheld computers.

It seems that through its embracement of IT, the Department is being kept in a permanent state of agility in readiness for any more impending disasters.

18/11/2003

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