Snow was gently falling as Ole Nielsen, Susan Sjoelander, and I walked from the parking lot into the offices of KMD in Copenhagen. The calm that greeted us was in sharp contrast to the last hectic week of December when KMD accomplished what some would call the greatest data and application migration in the history of Denmark, far surpassing the effort for Y2K. KMD was able to centralize the back offices of all the municipalities in Denmark and consolidate 300 of these entities to 100 between Christmas and New Years. In the process they worked with over 3000 different systems. When the switch was turned on January 2, all the municipalities came up without a glitch. The purpose of our visit was to congratulate KMD’s CIO, Erik Juel Sørensen and his staff on their success and get feedback on our support during this cut over.

Denmark has created a portal for digital citizen services most of which are placed at the municipal level. It supports life events around work, house, family, school, economy, pensions and others which are supported by the local government. The portal and applications were developed by a public private consortium with KMD, a private company and one of the leading ICT systems development houses in Denmark. This was created as a response to the dilemma that providers of digital public services often encounter: “How often do the citizens really need a particular service and how will anyone be able to locate it in the overload of information that is often connected with the Internet”. As one can imagine this type of consolidation took a lot of collaboration and cooperation. This project has been under a phased development for 5 or 6 year. However, all the municipalities would have to be cut over at the same time. They targeted the last week of 2006, between Christmas and New Years, for the cut over. This was equivalent to taking 300 different companies and converting them over in one week.

Preparation for the final integration of backend systems was done over the last year on Mainframe systems. KMD had to test every system over and over again to ensure that the final cutover would be successful. Key to this testing was the use of FlashCopy, a storage feature which enables the immediate creation of a duplicate copy of production data for use in development and test. Without this feature, taking copies of data would have been disruptive to the application and would have taken hours to complete before testing could commence. With FlashCopy, a relationship is established between a primary and secondary volume or dataset in a matter of minutes. Once this relationship is established, the secondary copy can be accessed almost immediately for development and test, while the data is being copied. The production application writes new data to both volumes. If a read request is made to the secondary for data that has not yet been written or copied from the primary, the request goes to the primary to be fulfilled. KMD relied on this feature to meet their schedule and achieve the successful cut over of services for all the municipalities in Denmark in their target window. We were happy to hear that this effort went smoothly and our products performed as expected.

Denmark is leading the way in taming the information overload of the internet to provide digital public services for their citizens. With the help of KMD they have set the benchmark for e-government.

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