Official Document Processing and Exchange Project

The rapid societal development and the fast lane life require maximum utilization of new technologies in the economic sector and in state administration bodies of most modern countries. In light of the serious aspirations of Serbia to position itself high within the international community, it must ensure the necessary technical technological preconditions, in order that the country is able to keep up with the growing intensify and quick pace of operations and communications worldwide. Following world trends and standards, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Serbia, being the key channel facilitating communication and business with the rest of the world, has in a timely fashion started modernizing its operative environment, in cooperation with the Pexim Solutions Company. The objective of the Ministry is quite „simple“– to ensure quality and most importantly fast exchange of information with the rest of the world.

            The purpose of the Project is to provide a software solution and infrastructure for processing and exchange of official documents, then to enable storage and management of unstructured and unconsolidated existing and future documents.

            Another Project goal is that all documents stored at the client workstations, at local disks and similar are consolidated and stored in central shared positions, i.e. to be placed under the control of a single system, that on its part would enable the Ministry maximum functionality in the document processing and exchange processes. The central data storage and the data management security systems are but a few advantages of this application, which simplifies and accelerates the operative processes within the Ministry and at more than 90 diplomatic and consular missions worldwide.

            The following have had the pleasure of participating in this Project: first and foremost the members of the team of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the implementation team from the Pexim Solutions Company, as well as the DM Dokumenten Management, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, as the donor and supervisory body.

            The Project Team has set itself clear and precise goals in order that the Project is realized within the envisaged period:

• Automatization of operative processes – simplification of communication and exchange of documents between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the diplomatic and consular missions
• Operative processes consolidation (processing and exchange of official documents, and following up the tasks)
• Document and data consolidation (structuring and redefining the templates, i.e. basic document models)
• Ensuring high level security of operative processes, of the document flow and the electronic archive
• Collaboration in document preparation
• Enhancing operative efficiency and cutting down operative costs
• Centralization of the entire system and of data storage

 

The requirements of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs go far beyond the framework of this project. Therefore, this is considered to be the first stage in the process of complete computerization of the operations of this institution, both within the Ministry and those conducted with external bodies  – other ministries, state bodies, foreign bodies and similar. In order that the application could satisfy these and the forthcoming needs, it has been necessary that the team select a platform that ensures maximum security, availability and most of all the possibility to upgrade and expand the module. This would mean that in addition to the quality workflow, defining the organizational structure and digital signature, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs could at any time introduce new modules such as Business Process Management, Trusted Content Services, Records Management, Digital Asset Management, Web Content Management… The only platform that according to the world standards fulfills the above referred to features is the EMC2 Documentum application– Enterprise Content Management.

The EMC2 Documentum platform evidently ensures:

• Simplification of the operative processes relying on the Workflow Manager  and of the Content Management advanced functions
• Raising the level of work efficiency and reducing the error occurrence possibility owing to the dispersive nature and diversity of the system
• Reliable and simple divisions and access to the contents and documents following previously defined rules
• Facilitated definition of the retention period for each individual document
• Reducing risks and costs

 

The implemented application is based on the long year following up the operative processes of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as related to the practical processes and document flows. Aiming at accomplishing maximum quality under minimum cost, the state of the art IT solutions have been taken into consideration, as well as the results and experiences of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of  other countries, where such and similar applications have been implemented (the UK, Switzerland , Germany and others).

In addition to satisfying the needs and introduced features, the implemented application has ensured the following elements:

• User interface which is uniform and which allows any user only such processing that is relevant to the user’s role within the system, coupled with the ensured access to groups of documents in respect of which certain operations need to be conducted.
• Storing documents in the original form using the Full text search tool
• Possibility to follow up the processes, tasks and documents throughout the system (workflow)
• Implementation of the digital signature mechanism