(As presented at the
Liferay Symposium, San Francisco , 2012)
Challenges of regulatory environments
What is a regulatory environment? One
example is an Australian statutory authority that administers state gambling
and liquor laws, including management of licensing and compliance.
We had already worked with them to produce
a Liferay-based intranet for employees and several specialised extranet
portals.
They wanted us to help them come up with an
improved way of managing the issuing and renewal for each of their 100+ types of licenses, which were all
currently in paper/scanned format. We discovered that the one major challenge
faced by these types of organisations is that end users (customers, applicants)
expect an uncomplicated, easy to use, and unified front with which to interact BUT
regulatory organisations by nature are comprised of a large number of highly
disconnected business stakeholders.
These disconnected
business stakeholders include:
- processing officers/clerks
- business unit managers
- legal/paralegal
- IT
- Security auditors
AND this disconnection is a major roadblock.
An online environment
that meets the expectations of regulatory bodies and their users, can only be
tenable if these stakeholders are able to interact in a managed way,
especially when a large number of documents and processes are in play.
The challenge of this project was to develop
a SmartForms software product for the effective collection and processing of
structured information from customers, employees and other stakeholders on a
single development, maintenance and operational platform. This includes surveys, collection of
feedback, applications of any type, as well as a wide range of business
specific product and service flows.
In our work with the authority we achieved
this connectivity and the resulting online regulatory environment via a
transition framework we developed which comprehensively covers all facets of
analysis, implementation, migration and maintenance.
- We used Liferay Portal Community Edition 5.2.3 to build this environment, in conjunction with JBoss Application Server 5 running MyOffice24x7 SmartForms.
- System is currently running 55 different forms, which each on average about 500 fields. Largest form contains almost 1500 fields, which we believe to be one of the longest online forms in the world.
- Each group of forms relies upon the connectivity of, on average, 5 different stakeholders within the organization (some with external stakeholders).
The SmartForms product is available for
purchase to public and private sector organisations where it can be customised
to the specific needs of the organisation and made available through
subscription where the SmartFormss can be accessed via a cloud service. This
service is also intended to provide access and manage a collection of
templates, forms and associated libraries developed and shared by the global
community.
We
have comprehensively documented this transition framework as a whitepaper ‘Moving Away From Paper Forms – Benefits,
Challenges and Solutions’, which is available on our website
Posts
