Background Information
Belgium has one national and two federal governments: Flanders and Wallonia. The Flanders Federal Government has nine ministries. Each ministry is governed by a minister who has one or more cabinets. The responsibility of each cabinet is to support the minister in management planning. There is an EDP manager for each cabinet.

Each ministry has address files that are specific to its expertise; for example, the ministry of culture has the addresses of the museums. Should the minister of culture want to send a mailing to school headmasters to promote a particular exhibition at a museum to students, he would have to make a request to his colleague, the minister of education. This example shows that in practice, the EDP managers lose a great deal of time converting and transferring data. In addition, every four years there is a new government, and the cabinets must start programs all over again.

The New Program
The decision was made to create one central database for all ministries in which all addresses were uniformly available in the same format to be shared by all. The platform would be a Windows NT server, as the main server, with ten local servers (with plans to expand to 50 or more) and 50 PC’s per local server. Criteria for choosing development software included the need for a powerful 4GL which would work in the Windows 95 and Windows NT environments. Visual DataFlex was chosen because of its proven stability, productivity, reliability and rapid application development (RAD) capability.

The new system currently has a main database consisting of 400,000 common addresses. Local databases consist of more than 600,000 common and individual addresses with personal remarks. By early 1998, it is expected that the main database will contain over 1,200,000 addresses. Future plans include expansion of the system to tie in with the administration, and Intranet / Internet connections

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