BCS News - BCS IT awards for excellence

Here's the full report on the BCS's IT Awards, handed out to winners at a prize-giving ceremony earlier this month.

The winners were from three distinct fields. First, Bob Smith of the Land Registry computer services department won with a conveyancing project.

Second, Mark Woodman of the Open University computing department won for a course on object oriented computing

Third, Richard Marshall of Quality Systems and Software (QSS) was rewarded for building a system that traced information back to its source.

Smith's conveyancing scheme, which happened as a result of the last government's Citizen's Charter initiative, was designed to provide the public with better access to records of all land and property throughout the UK.

After the initial proposal, a number of pilots were set up to test the viability of the project, and a board of senior consultants from the British Land Registry, Registers of Scotland and Citizens' Charter Unit came in to oversee the initiative.

The conveyancing pilot is a solicitors' application to speed up land searches by linking 10 organisations that hold relevant data. It then concentrates on the Land and Property Gazetteer, which is an index between the conveyancing pilot and the data holders. This should eventually hold data on every piece of land in the UK with a description, reference number and Ordnance Survey grid number.

Woodman describes his award-winning course as a 'radical introductory course in writing complex software systems'.

It centres on web technology and an object approach which depends on making a system concrete by expressing it as a collection of parts. The course emphasises the human elements of analysis, design and collaborative working.

Quality Systems and Software (QSS) was recognised for Doors, a management information tool. It is designed to store project information including specifications, test plans and results, standards, project plans and contracts.

The information is classified under projects, each of which contains a number of modules, and the modules contain a hierarchical structure of objects.

The objects store data as attributes, and changes in any of the data are recorded by a tight audit trail. This enables the system supervisor to verify that changes have been recorded. An addendum to the system, Links, allows the user to define relationships between objects.

The search for next year's winners begins early in 1999.