FEATURE
of procedures and processes within the Judiciary were not documented unambiguously through flow charts, this was a necessary step. Explains Alami Hamdan,“ We as consultants needed to advise them that you cannot automate unless you know what you want to automate in very clear terms.”
Other than discovering and documenting the workflows unambiguously, such exercises also throws up the presence of bottlenecks for further deliberation.“ If you have a process and it is already inefficient, it does not make sense to make it electronic. You will end up automating the bottlenecks.” However, any changes were to be within the scope of the processes as defined by the judiciary law.
The exercise of process discovery was a huge task with every process in every department being approached and discussed. The results of these discussions were documented as flow charts using standard business process management notation. The reasons for using this notation was to make it universally understood without ambiguity.“ It is very important that the notations with which the processes are flow charted is being understood by everyone and everyone understands the same thing from it. This is the main objective behind process discovery,” stresses Alami Hamdan.
The documented processes using business process management notation were then sent to the customer, who either approved them or corrected them in an iterative manner. This led to the final picture of“ knowing what we have” or the“ as-is” situation. The scope of the project defined the“ to-be” state. Comparison of the“ as-is” with“ to-be” presented the gap of what concrete actions were required to help move from“ as-is” towards“ to-be”.
Detailed gap-analysis gave Al Taqnyah answers of where the effort of modifying the as-is situation was more cost effective than creating new systems from scratch or the other way around.“ We did process consulting to provide the basis for the long-term e-transformation and to get good visibility of what you are going to do in the future. This helps identify whether you go from scratch or not,” says Alami Hamdan.
Al Naeem explains this further. Restructuring process management is more challenging than systems integration. You have to go for an as-is process, then modify it to-be process, which means you have to go through each and every process with the client and view it with the client. Since we are the technology partner we will suggest a few changes to the process, where it will make things more user friendly, secure, quicker, easier.”
With Al Taqnyah suggesting process changes, what are the benchmarks that Sudan Judiciary can use to benchmark improvement. In the past, the Judiciary may have averaged an X number of cases resolved over Y number of days. With conversion from conventional to automated systems the same X number of cases should be resolved in fewer number of days than Y. This allows the Judiciary to process more cases in the same number of Y days.
However, the most important change in automation is the specified number of days for each process step followed by an automatic escalation in case of delay, leading up to the highest level of Judiciary.“ You cannot delay anything,” adds Al Naeem.
Deep dive Portal The first place for Al Taqnyah to start was to build a web based login access for the services available from Sudan Judiciary. While Sudan Judiciary had a web site, the requirement was to integrate old and new services and to provide secure access through a login and password. The open source Drupal technology platform was chosen to build the responsive portal thereby making it compatible with all types of connected devices. The themes used in the portal development were partly out of the box and partly customised.
“ A portal is an access door. It is a door for employees and citizens into Sudan Judiciary, and to unify access to all applications and services. Based on my login and password I will have different access and different views to different services,” explains Alami Hamdan.
Land Registration System From the citizen point of view this is the most important service being managed by Sudan Judiciary. With the large land mass of the country, systematically and effectively registering property rights and ownerships is very important both from the legal point of view as well as to enable efficient citizen services. However, the existing application being used by the Judiciary had significant deficiencies. The process of completing a transaction did not have sufficient checks to reverse a failed transaction. There was no inbuilt payment gateway for deposit of fees and there was no inbuilt SMS system to keep faraway citizens updated on the status of their registration.
While making these changes Al Taqnyah also faced the challenge of not having access to the source code documentation. Notwithstanding these challenges Al Taqnyah successfully completed the upgrade of this application, without modifying the layout of the user interface.“ We did not rebuild the system since it would have had a major business impact,” adds Alami Hamdan.
Lawyer and Notary Information Management Systems After the Land Registration System, this is the next most important application for citizen access and use. It is a database that provides the legal status of every registered lawyer and notary in the country. To prevent fraud across the large mass of the country, only the most experienced lawyers have the right to appear as notaries across the country. The application manages the latest information about lawyers and their notarisation authority. Moreover, other application systems within the Judiciary are also linked to this one to internally cross check the status of the named notary.
High Courts Case Registration and Management This is an online application system to file a legal petition at the High Court level. This is a core business system with three levels of inbuilt stepwise litigation. The petition is registered online with attachments uploaded and the electronic payment completed. The automated petition process may be accepted, modification requested, or rejected with SMS notifications.
Document Management System Present day document management systems play multiple key roles. They build
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