Adopting ECM and BPM for e-governance

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Citizen and business centricity is at the core of every e-governance initiative. Citizen satisfaction to a large extent depends on how well and how fast services are delivered by the department.

Typically, these services are process centric and involves high amount of document exchange. Understanding the nature of these services will provide better insights into critical factors to be considered while IT system is designed to automate these services.

Process Centric Nature: These services are process centric and typically involve following steps:

-- Application Submission: These services will generally involve citizen/business to submit application form with supporting documents to the department. Examples include issuance of Certificates, licenses granting and management, accreditations, registration for services, Grant/Fund request etc.

-- Application Acceptance and Receipt: Application will be cross checked for completeness with certain mandatory checklist and receiving is provided to the applicant.

-- Application Review: Application is then reviewed by relevant officer. It might involve multiple steps and there can be some to and fro communication with application for exception resolution.

-- Application Approval: Technologies like digital signature can replace most of the paper based work.

-- Document Generation: Finally output document; License, Grant approval note, certificate etc as applicable is generated and provided to applicant.

There are multiple processes in such use cases. For example, certificate issuance will require other processes like Business Registration, sale of forms, expiry management, renewal, quality inspection etc. All these processes are interdependent and changes with time, laws and re-structuring within the department.

All these processes involve multiple document exchange between applicant and department. These documents become important for decision making and need to be archived for long term retention. There are cases during processing where historical information and documents submitted in past needs to be referred.

All of these important aspects demand strong Document Management capabilities both in manual and in electronic environment. Such systems which are process centric and have above mentioned characteristics are best candidates to be developed using the ECM and BPM platform.