Publicuk Casestudy Flienet

Editor's Notes

• #59: UWV is the agency, which is responsible for the implementation and execution of the Dutch laws around the unemployment and disability insurances of Dutch citizens. In former days the task of the social insurance companies had been primarily aimed paying the unemployment benefits and disability pensions. However, at present the emphasis on reintegrating the customers in the labour process lies. Historically, the social security was divided between several agencies. The employee insurance schemes had been arranged on the basis of specific regulations for specific industries, although they all had to obey and execute the same laws and regulations. The last independent industry branch with its specific own regulations was the Government. This was brought under the uniform employee insurance schemes by 1-1-1998. On 1 January 2002 a single agency was established, after the merger of five social insurance agencies and the former supervisory board one with more than 22,000 FTEs. The task put to this new company was: Reducing the administrative costs with 25%, A reduction of the workforce by approximately 10.000. Reducing the number of branches in the Netherlands from 167 to 17 back offices and 27 front-offices. A front office will also include a back office Because the predecessors of UWV were independent organisations, which, by nature, carried out same the task, a large redundancy of several systems existed performing the same tasks. To reduce the exploitation and management expenses consolidation of a large number of applications will be necessary. At present to the ICT expenditure is around 330 millions euros.
• #60: UWV is the agency, which is responsible for the implementation and execution of the Dutch laws around the unemployment and disability insurances of Dutch citizens. In former days the task of the social insurance companies had been primarily aimed paying the unemployment benefits and disability pensions. However, at present the emphasis on reintegrating the customers in the labour process lies. Historically, the social security was divided between several agencies. The employee insurance schemes had been arranged on the basis of specific regulations for specific industries, although they all had to obey and execute the same laws and regulations. The last independent industry branch with its specific own regulations was the Government. This was brought under the uniform employee insurance schemes by 1-1-1998. On 1 January 2002 a single agency was established, after the merger of five social insurance agencies and the former supervisory board one with more than 22,000 FTEs. The task put to this new company was: Reducing the administrative costs with 25%, A reduction of the workforce by approximately 10.000. Reducing the number of branches in the Netherlands from 167 to 17 back offices and 27 front-offices. A front office will also include a back office Because the predecessors of UWV were independent organisations, which, by nature, carried out same the task, a large redundancy of several systems existed performing the same tasks. To reduce the exploitation and management expenses consolidation of a large number of applications will be necessary. At present to the ICT expenditure is around 330 millions euros.
• #61: Why did we choose in such situation for the development and implementation of an Enterprise content management. One of the first reasons for this is of course cost reduction. Only by the introduction of new technology the reduction, which UWV must realise, can be achieved. The cost reduction cannot result in a lowering of the quality of services. Actually, we are aiming the improve the quality of our services. ECM contributes to the quality improvement. The information which is required for the correct executive decisions, is readily available. Hence, fewer mistakes are made and fewer, expensive, corrective actions are required. A more complete customer file would be more readily available to the case handlers by getting all relevant information from multiple sources. Obviously, this gives the case handles and decision maker the possibility to make better judgements, at least better documented decisions. This will result in fewer lawsuits. Hence, ECM support more effective processing of the customer cases. ECM improves the efficiency of the organisation without a negative impact, moreover, it improves the quality and speed of the delivery of the customer service . The time and manpower consuming logistical operations, which had no value-add to the products and service of our organization, were eliminated. Moreover the information is parallel available for several case handlers, which resulted in a decrease of the process time (and customer waiting period), as several persons have access to the file at the same time, and virtually immediately. The number of files lost was decreased to nil. By eliminating the logistical operations the process time was reduced dramatically. The introduction of workflow eliminated a complex logictical process, which was carried by the internal mail system. The Government’s cost cuttings within the social security system sets not only the time limits by implementing new laws, but particularly by changing existing laws. These changes succeed each other more rapidly. hence, it is necessary to be able to anticipate on and act quickly on changing legislation. Mostly the regulation has been approved by parlement only a month before it going in effect. adoptability and Time to Market are therefore important. The resettlement of UWVs employees from 167 branches to 27 branches, result in changes of the work locations of these employees. ECM ensure that all information is available everywhere throughout the organisation. At every given moment in the process, a UWV employee, regardless if the person participates in a call center, front office or back office process, will get the same information about the customer. As a result any UWV employee will always be able to give the full and complete information to an inquiring customer. The customer will never get a different story from UWV. The need to have the files available from various places by UWV employees is also due to more broader social developments. Social developments indicate that our economy tends to become a more and more 7*24 economy. The customers become more mature and want more influence on the process. ECM offers the possibility to the customer to participate in the processes, where the person can take their own responsibility. Despite of the fact that the customer increases their own involvement with UWV (and in so many words their own workload), they seem to experience this as a more customer-oriented approach. The internal discussion with regard to the implementation of ECM was, whether this project was merely aimed at moving paper archives to a digital archive, or could be used in support of the creation of a new business model, including multi-channelling, customer focus and self-service. It took some time to create the awareness that a Digitized Service Concept is different from the traditional digitalization of paper. When that awareness arose the senior management recognized it potential and is now a supporter of the Digitized Service Concept.
• #62: Some of the main considerations during the planning of the implementation of ECM were: Functional structuring of ICT-Architectuur. The ICT-Architectuur is divided in a number of large functional areas. These areas have been described in specific functionalities, which could be used as input the European Tendering process. Using the European tender system we choose products for each functional area. This is UWV’s “best of breed” approach. Although this approach provides perfect fits of products in each functional area, it also causes an integration challenge. Which was solved after a stressful test period. During the selection of the products close attention was paid to prevent Vendor Lock in. UWV wants to keep a certain degree of supplier independence, in order that we can stipulate our own innovation calendar. A single integration application approach (like S.A.P. for ERP) one is bound to certain supplier who then determines the speed of innovations for the ICT development of the organisation. The best of breed approach offers us the possibility to select applications which can be used in a stand alone mode as well as part of an integrated system. The different functional areas have been chosen in such way that the interfaces between the areas are simple. This allows the exchange of one product in one area, without costly changes to an area next to it. The choices for open standards and methodologies like SOA, Message-bus and XML/Soap enables this. The loose coupling is a result of these architectural choices. The application integration challenge is the price we pay for our Best of Breed strategy.
• #63: Central to the UWV architecture are the company business processes. We make a difference between business Process management and WorkFlow management. BPM is primarily aimed at managing the overall enterprise wide processes. Trigger management is an integral part of the solution, translating messages from Inputmanagement to driving the actual proceeses in BPM. Trigger management is crucial and it contains a lot of business logic. We had to do a lot of work on this by ourselves because on one hand few industrial solutions are available, while, on the other hand, trigger management had to reflect closely UWV business practises. No human interaction takes place within BPM. WorkFlow management is divided into two categories. The unattended WorkFlow and the Attended WorkFlow. The Unattended workflow is aimed at controlling automated operations where no human interaction is necessary. The Attended workflow is aimed at the control of automated operations where the employee is the actor. For the implementation of the processes the primary computer systems are necessary. These systems have been aimed at processing and holding the data. The existing systems of UWV are mostly monolithic in nature. All necessary functions are in one and the same system implemented in order to execute a business process. Processing, presentation and control is interwoven. This resulted in complex, and difficult maintainable, systems. Beside being monolithic these systems are batch oriented. Following the steps throughout a process or operation is not possible. Hence, using BPM to drive existing primaire monolithic process systems, based on batches, is very difficult. Experience learns that modular developed 3 GL systems are more easily to open-up than the more recent 4 GL systems. In the new set-up, the primary systems exist from a collection of small separate modules, which are made available as services. The process control layer organises the operations by the different modules. The modules are organisation independently and, as a result, relatively stable. Hence, large system developments belong to the past. Standard software like FileNet are made available to the organization by means of parameterisation. The employees who use the attended workflow will require both structured and unstructured information. This information is tailored on the basis of the business process. The archive is the robust storage for the unstructured information. The archive has to meet the legal requirements with respect to minimum and maximum retention times. The users regard the archive as essential, though that are not interested in the (technical) setup or principles behind it. Most of the communications with the outside world is via paper. Some of these formal communications are even required to be on paper, as “blue” signatures are required for example. The creation process for these formal letters is based on “data-text-blocks”. These standard blocks of test can be retrieved and used in order to create high quality documents. In order to increase the accessibility and “customer friendliness” UWV has adopted a multichannel concept: both electronic and fysical channels are enabled to communicate to the customers. The internal processing at UWV has to be independent of the input channel used for the information. Hence input management has been developed. The concept of Input management allows the translation of the various formats and channels into a UWV internal format, which can be moved around, stored, and retrieved at great ease, by translating the information into XML/SOAP. Input management has a number of tasks. First the different channels and medium types are converted to one univocal format: XML/soap. Then the message is passed to the trigger management of the BPM and Processes are started and restarted The structured data is extracted from the document and passed on to the primaire applications, while the original document is stored. At the output site we find the mirror of input management. From the XML message various formats are made and sent to the appropriate out put channels. A copy of the outgoing message is stored. As a result a complete communication cycle is available. Additional problem for output management is the large mutation degree in the address data. Although the correspondence address remains generally the same over longer periods of time, more modern address forms, such as e-mail and mobile phone number do not. Hence, it is necessary that the management of these addresses is given to clients s by means of self service. Internet is of the most important channel. Not only for sending and receiving data but also to supply information to the customers and UWV’s partners, like taxation office, and enable them to participate in the various processes. Obviously, a level of trust between the end users and UWV has to be established through authentication and authorisation processes. This integrated approach makes it possible to use various communication strategies with the customer, solving some delicate issues surrounding security and privacy. For instance, the customer is informed of new documents in the electronic archive through the email channel and is invited to logon to his “My UWV”. The logon provides the authorization and the information is encrypted during the session, ensuring that security and privacy rules are adhered to.
• #64: Within the organisations from which UWV arose several electronic archives were used. The more recent archives were developed around Filenet Panagon and Image Server was used. In architecture recognise of the electronic file had a number of problems which had to do with privacy, task related and process specific information. After research it appeared that Image Server did not have a standard solution. At the introduction of P8 it appeared that the content the server did offer this standard solution. On the basis of a costs/benefit analysis, we decided to move to P8, instead of building the solution ourselves. In addition P8 offered us additional benefits like more extensive index searching and record management.
• #65: The C-ICT department created an in-depth business and process architecture, which is the reference for any application and architectural choices or discussions. In the last few years several products have been created based on this architecture. The implementation of various business cases, using these products, delivered the first automated business processes based on ECM. The implementation process was slower and more labour intensive than initially hoped for. The reason for this were organisational, not technical. The board of directors made resources available to realise the technical aspects of the architecture. In an organisation undergoing continuous change (reorganisation, staff reduction, merger and new legislation) management has conflicting goals. Firstly, the current service levels are of paramount importance. Hundred of thousands of people depend on swift disbursement of their benefits. Missing a payment run would endanger the very existence of the organisation. Stability is required for this. At the same time innovation must take place. Without this innovation UWV would not provide the necessary production and services, with half its current workforce; and a commercial competition would eventually take over. To overcome the conflicting interests, UWV has chosen to separate the innovation efforts. These efforts are underway, in separate unit and with an appropriate budget. Because of this the necessary conditions can be arranged without the going concern experiencing any change. The effective implementation is however left to the initiative of the going concern departments. As UWV’ departments keeps experiencing external pressure to reduce it work force and cut costs, it takes a hell of an effort to get the department to adopt the new technology and start the actual implementation. This must lead eventually to, however, considered implementation of new architecture.
• #66: The development of architecture and corresponding tools have had their up's and down's. The organisation had not been interested during the start of the development. Requests to participate in the development were rejected categorically with the motivation that too much energy was already going into the merger and convergence of the various departments. Given the projected length of time needed for the development it was nevertheless decided to start with the various projects and developments. Later in the process, the going concern rejected the first results, because they had not been involved in the initial development. The validility and applicability of the solution was questioned. Every time a solution was proposed, it was necessary to produce a POC, as it was not yet tested in our specific surroundings. At some places in the organisation the need for innovation was present, due to new laws, which had be carried out. From this group the early adopters came. After a number of successes the new architecture and the associated products gained accepted and were more and more used. Unfortunately, the height of expenses are at their peak during the period of rejection, making further expenditure to finalise the products difficult. Finding early adaptors, who would be faced with high initial investments is difficult under these circumstances. These early adaptors are crucial for the success of the innovative developments. The threshold is further increased for these early adaptors by the current licence policies of most software vendors, who charges the fees upfront. New business models should be created to enable implementations of innovative solutions. Savings in business process time, labour and other costs, can only be expected during and after the period of acceptation. It is expected that the savings will grow with every implementation and during the completion of the reference architecture.
• #67: Lessons Learned Innovatie is essential in a changing organisation Expert approach needs to be on the basis of an insight in the business requirements.