The Problem

As one of the biggest municipalities in Norway, Baerum Kommune decided to introduce a new solution for its residents to register and upload forms for all public services via the Internet. The public sector in Norway is facing similar challenges to those of the commercial or industrial areas. Government needs to be able to ensure alternative customer channels to its public services and to exploit the possibilities of Internet technology in providing continuity of quality and around the clock availability of public services.

The continuous improvement of the public services as an overall target required the reengineering of the processes for the delivery of those services, provided via new customer channels as the new Internet service registration form solution.

The focus was to guarantee a positive user experience in the form of an effective and responsive GUI web application and a fast and precise, possibly highly automated case handling process to reduce the unnecessary administration overhead and increase the quality and efficiency of the municipality’s public services.

As a proof-of-concept, the municipality chose the SFO after-school care program to implement the first Business Process Management (BPM) project. The SFO service is used by several thousands of families in the local community. The solution needed to provide a user-friendly and future-proof process for handling service registration – to create a new order, modify service usage or cancel the service. While the project was to provide the public with a valuable new service its main goal was to verify how the concept of BPM can help the municipality meet the challenges of providing a quality user experience twenty-four hours a day through an efficient utilization and orchestration of the customer’s existing independent application solutions.

The Solution

Baerum Kommune and CommITment AS established a joint project to evaluate the concept of Business Process Management in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and to verify the potential with the introduction of a BPMS solution.

The project focused on the involvement of people from the business line working with the overall business process model and the business service definitions.

A BPM centric SOA governance organization was developed to manage the complexity of an enterprise wide implementation of the technology. It was necessary to identify and assign functional ownership of the business service(s) and process(s) as well as the underlying support services.

Key elements of the process were:

• The “SFO” handling process must be initiated from a web UI, integrated into the customer’s Internet portal where the user initiates the SFO service registration form.
• The process qualifies that the user has the right to use the service (for each individual child).
• It provides all the information the user needs to fulfill the form. As a main requirement, the service must pre-complete the form so that the user doesn’t have to provide information the service owner already possesses.
• When the user completes the registration form, the process has to ensure the proper archive of the registration form (based on Norwegian public standards) and executes the handling of the registration, informing the appropriate agencies responsible and finally confirms the registration.

From a project perspective essential factors defined for success were:

• Design and implement a chosen public service as near to production release as possible
• Build competencies of the concept, the used technologies and project collaboration form
• Gain experiences with service and process design, implementation and governance

The Technology

All the integration between the processes and the end user UI application, just as the underlying services, was implemented by using web service technology and routed via MuleSource Enterprise Service Bus.

XSLT transformation was used for some complex data transformation invoked by the process executable.

Web services offered an efficient technology to incorporate the process with other application services and guaranteed proper integration with human workflow.

The Benefits

• Easily adjusts to new requirements as they evolve
• Provides 24x7 service
• Reduces registration time from days to seconds

INTALIO|BPMS as an open-source based solution provided a fully integrated framework to design, deploy and execute business processes. Since the mandate of the project was defined as “proof-of-concept”, the need for a fast start up was a key criterion. Intalio offered the municipality a way to get started immediately based on a low cost implementation. BPM standards, such as BPMN, BPEL, WSDL, and XSD, made the design intuitive and easy, and the process could be fully executed without the need to touch any code.

One of the key experiences of the project is that now, because of the value of achieving automated processes, business resources are more willing to be involved in an early stage of the project, by providing service assessment, defining the specific service(s) and process(s), identifying requirements and designing overall process flows.

Process modeling and implementation is a step forward in bringing the business side and IT closer together, and thereby ensuring solutions that provide the defined business values and are understood and accepted by the business side. Working with BPM/BPMS forces the business side to be precise and detailed in their service and process descriptions, before using the intuitive interface of Intalio|Designer this was seen as a significant challenge.

Because of Intalio|BPMS, CommITment AS was able to build a solution for Baerum Kommune that:

• Easily adjusts to new requirements as they evolve
• Can verify needs as they are defined during the pilot project through to production.
• Provides 24x7 availability, previously the service was only available 8x5
• Reduces the handling time of registration from days to seconds
• Eliminates the need for the customer to appear in person
• Reduces the administration time required for processing the registration

Implementation Partner

CommITment AS is a Norwegian based consultancy company, aiming to improve business for their customers through the use of information technology. Their consultants are highly skilled in project management, enterprise architecture, service oriented architectures and process improvement utilizing a BPMS. Commitment has years of experience improving core business processes for several large Norwegian and Scandinavian companies. This includes processes for planning, product development, infrastructure provisioning and product/service provisioning. Their results are quite impressive in terms of efficiency and profitability. Main customer industries include the telecom industry and public sector. Their consultants honor the company name - they're committed, proud of the profession and deliver the quality services that they promise.