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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