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Background:
The Ministry of
Expatriates is the highest Syrian authority responsible for
serving the interests of Syrian expatriates in the
world by attending to their affairs and providing them with
effective channels of communication within all the sectors
in Syria.
The Ministry works on
encouraging the Syrian Expatriates to be Syria’s ambassadors
wherever they are by providing them with a wide range of
supporting services like:
- Supporting expatriates inter and intra communal
cooperation and integration.
- Coordinating between
the expatriates as individuals and as a community.
- Supporting expatriates
academic, social and economic development.
- Representing and
defending expatriates in front of the local and
international authorities.
- Strengthening
expatriates ties to the homeland as a focal point for their
development and continuity.
- Encouraging
expatriates to invest in all sectors as key partners in the
advancement of Syria’s reform and
development processes.
Customer
Needs (Challenge):
To be part of the Syrian
“e-government”, the Ministry of Expatriates sought after
investing in its infrastructure by planning to implement a
powerful Content Management System that is capable of
handling and automatically processing the day-to-day
significantly increasing amounts of requested services
submitted by the expatriates, while providing new set of
communication tools that would help the Ministry to provide
a better service in less time.
The system must work on
structuring the internal processes to provide employees with
a more centralized and efficient knowledge-sharing
environment, and automate the Ministry’s internal and
external correspondence system to reach the goal of becoming
a paperless work environment. The system must as well,
provide a fast access to the stored data with flexible
searching tools in order to speedup the process of service
providing and ensure a higher level of customer service
support.
Solution:
Referring to the successful
record of system implementations within the governmental
sector in the Middle East, and for the properly prepared and
presented Pilot by ASSET Team, the Syrian Ministry of
Expatriates decided to choose ASSET to take charge of this
challenging project.
As soon as the agreement was
made, ASSET team started to carefully analyze the submitted
customer needs and came up with a well studied plan for the
system implementation in the Ministry.
The solution was expected to
facelift the Ministry’s website and convert it into an
integrated Portal that presents a wide set of e-service to
the Syrian Expatriates like: Visit requests to enter Syria,
Leave Facilitation Request, Residence Extension Request,
Investment Problem, Investment Case in Syria, General
Inquiries… All while providing some easy-to-use tools for
Portal Contents updates that are suitable for users with
varying levels of computer knowledge.
The internal processes had to
be automated and linked to the online services so whenever a
service request is submitted, it automatically start its
cycle within the Ministry’s different departments, all in
addition to a full automation of the internal and external
correspondence system used by all the Ministry’s
departments.
After a careful study
of the Ministry’s structure, activities, website, used
applications and set of requirements, ASSET recommended a
solution based on Jupiter Enterprise Suite including:
- Business Process Automation of major work activities
by providing guided procedures that ensure a smooth
collaboration between all the departments involved in the
process of issuing, reviewing and finally approving a
requested service or document.
- Documents & Records
Management for handling the capturing, organizing and
retrieving of all the Ministry’s
documents as well as
planning for each document’s lifecycle within the system.
- Website Content
Management that integrates with Jupiter’s document
management and workflow automation
solutions to utilize the
information stored into Jupiter repository using a simple
GUI for non-technical users in order
to manage the portal’s
content authoring, review and publishing processes.
- Portal Integration
with Oracle Portal using Jupiter’s Portal Integration Kit,
to help Ministry deliver an e-Services
Portal and automate
the internal requests initiated from within the portal.
-
Full Text Retrieval
that locates the
documents, not simply by their keywords, but by the text
that is contained in
them and generate
reports to support the decision making.
- Office Integration
helping users to be more productive by storing and
retrieving documents directly from within MS
Office
interface.
The solution offered a
smart way to create a single point of contact between all
the Ministry’s departments. Full automation of both the
internal and the external correspondences was successful
implementation in the following departments:
- Front Office
- Information and
Culture Department
- Information
Technology Department
- Public
Relations Department
- Managerial and
Legal Department
- Financial
Department
- Minister’s
Office
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