The Spanish government’s ambitious project to computerise its social security department, INSS, should be implemented in five of the country’s regions by the end of this year. The project was started in Madrid in 1987 in the hope of reducing the time taken in handling pension data by introducing Philips Megadoc optical disk filing systems as an alternative storage system to microfilm. Megadoc has been installed in 28 offices in the Madrid region, which has an infrastructure to absorb information month by month and can keep up to 30m images on line. The next four regions to benefit from the system will be Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao and Seville, though more concrete ideas on the project’s future aims will be released in June. At the moment, the problem is conversion from microfilm to Megadoc, but Philips Informatica y Communicaciones has produced software to facilitate this and is studying the problem of bad film quality. In addition, as part of an employment information systems plan, which will join unemployment and social security databases, the General Computer Board has put out tenders for a $31m contract for a support system for extension of the loan file transmission system which is already installed in five regions supported by IBM 9370 small mainframes.
