Electronic Document Imaging Solution for Births, Marriages & Death Certificates Digitization & Issuance Colombo, Sri Lanka

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1 Page 1 of 6 Electronic Document Imaging Solution for Births, Marriages & Death Certificates Digitization & Issuance Colombo, Sri Lanka THE SITUATION Births, Marriages and Death certificates are highly important civil registration documents managed by Registrar Generals Department of Sri Lanka. The department provides the registration and issuance of certificate copies to general public through an Island wide network of government administrative offices named Divisional Secretariat (DS) Office. Copy of these certificates are highly important in various official activities such as enrolling students to schools/ universities, obtaining driving licenses & passports, proving marriage & death for claiming benefits & welfare etc. During the year 2004 tsunami disaster millions of such important documents were destroyed from the DS offices situated close proximity to the coastal belt in the northern and southern areas of Sri Lanka without leaving a trace of civil registration information related to thousands of people. Government had to place great effort to re-register all the civilians reissuing these certificates spending millions worth monitory due to non-availability of proper disaster management & recovery procedures. Prior to disaster, certificate issuance process was not satisfactory due to physical handing and maintenance of large file repositories with millions of certificates had to go through the staff with manual search procedures & manual approval workflow processes. General public faced numerous difficulties and delays in obtaining copies of Births, Marriages and Death certificates. The life cycle of the certificate issuance was 5-10 working days and reported various types of malpractices and corruption. Year 2007 Registrar Generals Department of Sri Lanka together with Colombo District Secretariat Office took a new initiative to introduce appropriate electronic/computerized solution to address these issues & concerns by initiating BMD Project and was awarded the contract for software solution and digitization services to Sanje Lanka Private Limited, the largest document management solutions & services provider in Sri Lanka. THE CHALLENGE The main objective of the BMD project is to introduce disaster recovery & backup procedure, increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the storage and issuance process for Births, Marriages and Death certificates at the Division Secretariat Office s via ICT enabled systems and processes. This project planned to lead the way in terms of curbing corruption and malpractices in relation to counterfeit BMD certificates. It also ensured that data is stored utilizing a secure and effective method, while allowing Divisional Secretarial staff to easily gain access to required certificates and information. It is also intended to utilize the output of this project as inputs for eds and epopulation Register projects as civil registration systems are an integral component of those projects.

2 Page 2 of 6 Furthermore it is aimed to implement this as a pilot project to test the basic hypothesis of public document conversion concepts and its feasibility at the national level. The scope of the initial phase include digitization of 7 million active Births, Marriages and Death certificates in Colombo District and implement centralized document imaging solution with electronic workflow to support certificate issuance process for 13 Divisional Secretariat Offices. Project was planned to execute within a 12 month period. THE SOLUTION In view of above, following conceptual diagram highlight the key components of the solution setup implemented in Colombo District to support mentioned objectives. Form-less Document Systems Logical System Model Integration with External SW & HW Applications External applications Internet Remote Document Users Create Retrieve Manipulate Document Capture Environment Document Management Environment Perimeter Firewall Internal Document Users WAN/LAN Documents Scan Index Release Form-less Document Systems V3.0 Create Edit Retrieve Manipulate Physical Document Archive Digital Backups or DRC Centre System/Portal Administrators Store until retention period expires Backups Manage Control Implement As you may seem the conceptual diagram explains this solutions consist with, Document capture environment with distributed document scanning and indexing features to support live Births, Marriages & Death certificate digitization and release

3 Page 3 of 6 to central and local document repositories. All of the 13 DS offices capture live document volumes on a daily basis. Electronic document management environment Form-less Document System web based document management solution implemented to manage all the digitized image and index data repositories while allowing authorized users to search, retrieve and initiate certificate issuance workflow. This software solution manages security in data, presentation, transmission and user levels. DRC Centre has implemented to manage exact copies of data and systems allowing automatic redirection of all the services and requests in a catastrophic situation. These centers backup all the digital documents with index & transaction data which can use to restore systems and data at any given time. Physical Document Archive manage the physical records to accomplish legal requirements and regulations. Authorized users from Divisional Secretariat Officers access Births, Marriages & Death certificates through Form-less document systems for certificate issuance purposes. Form-less Document Systems: e-government Edition Form-less Document Systems 3.0 (e-fds) is a web based advanced document management solution which provides number of user friendly features and options to manage and administrate electronic document archives, libraries, repositories, end users and their activities with electronic documents. E-FDS provides fast and easy document retrieval, manipulation and process/ task oriented workflow while providing advanced document repository management, user portal management, integration with line of business and legacy systems and security management etc. Form-less Document Systems provide advanced security options to control accessibility including encryption, audit, report & log management, Authorization and authentication management and advanced security integration with Microsoft Active Directory etc.

4 Page 4 of 6 The key functionalities provided by Form-less document systems (FDS) in this project including, e-fds Feature Availability Document Search, Retrieval and Manipulation Electronic Image Enabled Workflow (Approval, feedback, integrated etc.) Document Print, and Export Workspace / Portal Management Import/ Export Documents (through ETL services and procedures) Document Life Cycle Management Standard and Integrated Workflow Reports (transaction, administrative, audit and statistical) Security Management User Management Integration Management System Administration and Maintenance Document and Data Repository Administration and Management System Backup and Recovery Management (!) Please refer the attached FDS Whitepaper for detail specification of form-less document systems version 3.0 Document Digitization Process Approximately 7 million Births, Marriages & Death Certificates digitized, indexed and released into the document imaging solution. Digitization activities performed by Sanje Lanka Private Limited using industry standard document digitization setup assures international standards, quality levels and more importantly the performance levels in terms of capture volume. This setup equipped with high end production document scanners and capture management application setup to provide throughput of 50,000 certificates per day with scan, image

5 Page 5 of 6 quality control, indexing, index quality control and release into live data repositories and DR centers. All documents scanned with 200 DPI black and white in CCITT-G3/G4 compresses TIFF image format maintaining high quality images yet lesser in image size. Average double page image size is around 100 Kilobytes. Following document indexes are created for each certificate for online search and organization purposes. 1. Name 1: Owners Name for Birth & Death Certificate & Grooms Name for Marriage certificate 2. Name 2: Brides Name for the Marriage Certificate and Mothers Name for Birth certificates 3. Effective Date: Birth Date, Marriage Date, Death Certificate Date 4. Serial Number: Mentioned in Certificate 5. District Secretariat Office Name: which DS Office is belongs to 6. Divisional Secretariat Office Name: which certificate belongs to 7. Other Digitization Related indexes such as scan date, machine numbers etc. THE RESULTS The BMD project completed within project schedule delivering expected objectives and currently running successfully in the afore mentioned 13 DS offices in Colombo District for almost 2 years by the date 31 st December Any citizen can obtain their Births, Marriages & Death certificates from any Divisional Secretariat Offices in Colombo District within 3 minutes time. As a result citizens are saving their time and staff benefitted serving more clients while easily searching documents

6 Page 6 of 6 through browser based application and approve/ reject or return application requests through electronic workflow. Corruptions and malpractices reduced as no delays in searching and issuance process. And other government institutions benefitted by ability of verification of certificate issued. Details of certificate issued including certificate numbers, applicant details are available in the system. This will eradicate the problem of preparation of the counterfeit certificate Due to the success of this project the Government of Sri Lanka together with Information & Communications Technology Agency, of Sri Lanka have initiated the second phase of the project by introducing document management technology to all 255 Divisional Secretariat Offices in Sri Lanka of which the project is in progress at this moment in time.