Pesticides Safety Directorate

SUCCESS STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Key the word pesticides into Google UK and the first hit you’ll get is not some global agrochemical brand or giant industrial combine, but instead a small government directorate located in the North of England. But size, as they say, isn’t everything. The Pesticides Safety Directorate (PSD) may be just some 200 people strong, yet its work benefits the environment and the health and safety of millions of people. It also regulates a market worth around £450 million in the UK and a similar figure in overseas exports. An increasingly important tool in this work is the Ingres Business Open Source database, the software foundation which underpins many of the back office systems that the PSD relies on. "We’ve used Ingres since 1992 when it was chosen as our strategic database and never seen a reason to change. We’ve always been happy with it," says Andrew Park, IS Project Manager at the PSD.

Ingres, however, is not just working behind the scenes at the PSD, it has a much more visible role too. Indeed anyone clicking that first Google hit will experience it first hand. They’ll be taken straight to the PSD’s own Web pages which are served up by – yes – Ingres. The PSD’s mission is twofold. It is responsible for ensuring that the plant protection products used by farmers, growers, foresters, the food industry and amateur gardeners alike are safe, effective and comply with European regulations. The organization is also charged with shaping policies on pesticide issues in the UK.

This work is done by a dedicated team of scientists, policy makers and support staff at the PSD’s York headquarters. It is testament to their efforts during 2006/7 that while product approval applications ran 23% above predictions, all key ministerial goals for the directorate were achieved and the overall target for the time taken to process applications was beaten by a comfortable margin. Andrew Park and his 13 colleagues in IT can take some of the credit. "IT is central to the organization, it is the backbone of everything that we do," he says, citing the reliability and robustness of Ingres as important factors in the database’s 15 years and counting at the PSD. And as so many other publicly accountable organizations have found, the financial benefits of Business Open Source are compelling when compared with the conventional commercial model.

"We have to be careful about what we spend: we don’t have an unlimited budget. As a full cost recovery organization, value is extremely important to us, as is the flexibility to change as business changes,” Park adds.

While he mentions flexibility almost as a postscript, he acknowledges that it is in fact a crucial element in meeting yet one more of those targets: this time one that has been set at the very highest level. As an executive agency of the UK Government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the PSD doesn’t just work to annual performance targets. There are also more strategic, central government targets to be met. One of those is for the electronic delivery of all services and Ingres is once again playing a role in its realization.

In a project that came in on time, under budget and saw the PSD short-listed for a national IT award, Park and his colleagues have already delivered the fully electronic and secure signing of licence documents. All of this happens inside Ingres, through a Web front end built in the database’s companion OpenROAD development environment. The results have been dramatic: reduced paperwork, improved efficiency and significant reductions in time and costs. Park is understandably proud of the achievement.

But the next step in electronic delivery promises even more. This aims to digitize the completion and submission of product applications – a process which now involves incoming paper forms being manually logged into the Ingres-based system. Once this phase is complete, the entire application/approval workflow will be electronic end-to-end.

"Smart application specialists here will build the approval documents and they’ll be put in the system for companies to download and submit securely," says Park.

While he makes it sound easy, there is additional, complex work involved in converting the present paper forms into XML format for the new system. This calls for another software product, an electronic forms package. For this role the PSD team has chosen Open Source again, the Web 2.0 ready XForms model, and is currently working to link this with Ingres. With several very well established commercial forms packages on the market, the XForms choice might be viewed as a bold one. But Park remains comfortable with the decision.

"The whole Open Source, philosophy is good but you do have to pick and choose products," he cautions. Having said that, with what we save by going open source we can pay a consultant to do some of the work, for example the forms to database consultancy part.

"The costs stack up favorably with open source and we’re not paying for a commercial product," he adds.

"Take SQL server as an example. It might be cheaper to buy and install but then there’s client access licence's, development server, enterprise edition – the costs soon start mounting up. And once it’s in, it’s difficult to change things. Then there’s the whole version upgrades thing," he says. "Now we’ve got flexibility. We can put what we want where we want, support and maintain three servers, use a community edition for trial purposes, and we’ve got the flexibility for all eventualities."

With its long track record at the PSD, it’s perhaps not surprising that Ingres has run on a variety of platforms. It all started with Siemens-Nixdorf in the early days, eventually migrating to Windows NT4.

More recently, it has moved to Windows 2003 where it happily services tens of thousands of internal queries every month, as well as serving up between 300,000 and 500,000 Web pages.

In the future, another platform move – this time to an open source operating system – could well be on the cards. "We want if possible to reduce our dependency on Microsoft," says Park.

"Now we’re looking at Ingres running under Linux and it just doesn’t break, it’s virtually bombproof."

He also likes the community feel that is part and parcel of open source, citing the Ingres experience as an example. "We really enjoy the enthusiasm of all the people we meet in the Ingres user community. And the technical support from the company has always been great, the people there are all real Ingres aficionados. But to be honest there haven’t been many things we’ve come across that we couldn’t fix by simply going to the user community on the Web."

For more information about the Pesticides Safety Directorate visit: http://www.pesticides.gov.uk