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eJustice
eGovernment Authority, Kingdom of Bahrain
Bahrain

The Problem

The eGovernment Strategy identified Justice Services as one of the prime set of services. The services covered and situation before the solution were the following:
1) Formation of a Regulation Cases: This service is used by Business and individuals for registration of the cases. More than 18,000 cases are registered in a year and on an average it takes more than an Hour for people to stand in the queue and register the cases at the various courts. The process required individuals to be physically present at the court premises for this service. This also involved the payment of service charges.
2) Case Inquiry: This is a status inquiry of the case details by the lawyer or individual which required the individuals to visit the court. The volume of status inquiry request was very high.
3) Court execution ruling payment: This comprised of three sub-services and help citizens and businesses to pay and enquire about court execution ruling. This service also required waiting in queues for hours and around 90,000 requests are received in a year.
4) Issue of Notary certificates: This included the delivery of 13 different types of notarized certificates to be issued to the requestor (Individuals and Businesses) This service takes several hours to even days for issuing the certificates due to the long process. The average number of requests received in a year is 50,000.
5) Payment of criminal orders: Certain cases classified as criminal orders required payment of monetary fines. The person needs to physically visit the court for the payment. The waiting time is 1 hour and around 22,000 requests are received in a year.
6) Issue of Wealth Distribution Certificates: There are 5 different certificates issued under this service. The time taken to deliver varies from hours to several days. On an average 4500 request are received in a year.
7) Registration of Lawyers and Experts: these included 6 services – registration, renewal of lawyers and experts.
More than 30 services were identified which have high impact on the citizens and lawyer community. All these services had long waiting time, required physical presence and also multiple visits. Therefore, a process reengineering and automation was envisaged to improve the service delivery in terms of efficiency of the Ministry of Justice, thereby providing faster services to the citizens and lawyer community.

Solution and Key Benefits

 What is the initiative about? (the solution)
All the below mentioned services were provided online through the national portal of the Kingdom of Bahrain. The key benefits were the following:
• Eliminated physical visits of people at the courts for most of the time
• Considerable reduction in service delivery time
• Online submission of applications, enquiry and payments for services
• Increased efficiency of MoJ due to automation
• Less traffic at the court premises
• Improved morale and image of the system as people received the services at a higher service level.
The key benefits service wise is provided below:
1) Formation of a Regulation Cases: The service requests are provided online and therefore physical presence is avoided. Online facility for payment is provided, and hearing date is provided.
2) Case Inquiry: This service is provided instantaneously online.
3) Court execution ruling payment : This service is provided online as an online payment solution
4) Issue of Notary certificates: The service requests are provided online and therefore physical presence is avoided. Online facility for payment is provided and the designated day for the receipt of certificate is sent to the requester.
5) Payment of criminal orders: This service was enabled as a payment service online and is instantaneous.
6) Issue of Wealth Distribution Certificates: The applicant could submit the online requests with attachments and he will be notified of the collection date by SMS. This reduced the physical presence, provision of online payments etc.
7) Registration of Lawyers and Experts: This service provided submission of online applications for registration, renewal of licenses and payments for the same.

Actors and Stakeholders

 Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
The Justice Service was one of the key services envisaged as a part of the eGovernment strategy. The reason being that more than 50,000 certificates issued per year and more than a 150,000 services of different nature were provided by MoJ.
The new automated process involved multiple stakeholders – Ministry of Justice (MoJ), and eGovernment authority (eGA), The lawyer community etc.
The solution was completely developed in-house by eGA with the assistance of MoJ.
The roles of the respective stakeholders were the following:
• MoJ: Primary owner of the service, providing the business requirements, development support with backend connections, updation of data, processing of all the service requests (certifications / applications) etc.
• Lawyer community: Primary users of the service, providing inputs on the current issues and difficulties of the service, providing guidance on the To-Be state of service, end user requirements etc.
• eGA: Conduct as-is study, recommend to-be process with appropriate process reengineering, Design and develop the solution, integrating with the MoJ CIO data bases, testing and deploy the solution, undertake training to the users, marketing and awareness of the service to the public.

(a) Strategies

 Describe how and when the initiative was implemented by answering these questions
 a.      What were the strategies used to implement the initiative? In no more than 500 words, provide a summary of the main objectives and strategies of the initiative, how they were established and by whom.
eGA has developed its own strategies for solution development, which are based on the principles of better eGovernance like – usability, transparency, availability, scalability, accessibility, security, confidentiality etc.

1) Citizen centric service design: The solution design was considered based on the requirements from end users like the lawyers, the judged, the citizens etc. This helped in creating user friendly solution addressing the needs of the stakeholders. For e.g. all applications were provided online, sms based status were provided, online payments were enabled, and appointment based court visits were instituted for physical transactions.

2) Process redesign / reengineering: The solution demanded several redesigns and in some cases process reengineering. This was completed with the support of the MoJ staff.

3) Change management: MoJ is one of the traditional ministries and all transactions were provided in Arabic. Therefore, change management was a major requirement in fulfilling the solution implementation.

4) Marketing and Awareness: The key success for the high appreciation of the services were targeted marketing and awareness created among the user community especially the lawyers and judges. This enabled more people to use the services.

(b) Implementation

 b.      What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
Key development and implementation steps included the following:
1) User study: A study was conducted among the various stakeholders – the lawyer community, the citizens, the MoJ employees etc for understating the issues, expectation for improvement of services, challenges etc. Based on the same, the user requirements were identified.

2) As-Is & To-Be process: eGA and MoJ studied the existing processes of the related service and also designed the To-Be services. The To-Be process was designed based on the required SLAs, process efficiency, change management etc.

3) Service development: eGA has its own methodology for service development (Service Development Life Cycle) based on ITIL, CMMi etc. The various phases of service development include the high level design, low level design, testing, QA and service roll out.

4) Business continuity and operations: eGA and MoJ has together tied up and created processes for continued business operation to provide the services 24X7. The eGA contact centre provides the customer support and eGA payment gateway provides the payment facility.

(c) Overcoming Obstacles

 c.      What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
The MoJ is one of the traditional ministries and all services were provided in Arabic. The various obstacles which were faced and the actions adopted to overcome the same are the following

1) Lack of competencies: The ministry did not have enough competency or skill among the resources to support the BPR, solution design and software development. eGA provided assistance to MoJ for BPR, and solution design. The software development was undertaken jointly between MoJ and eGA. Further eGA supported MoJ for testing, QA, documentation and also hosting the services on the National Portal
2) Change management: The services required the ministry to process the services in a new way. This initiated some change management as the staffs were doing part of the processing in the systems. This transition was undertaken through proper training, education and awareness to MoJ staff.
3) Business continuity: The services provided were not one time, but a continuous process. Therefore, more than one time solution development, the focus was to set up the business operations to support the delivery of services. This required certain SLAs to be designed and adhered to. eGA supported MoJ to develop the same
4) Building trust and credibility among the user: Traditionally all MoJ services required physical presence of the service recipient. Therefore, by enabling the services online, the end users as well as the ministry staff were skeptical on the trust, credibility and confidentiality of the services. These apprehensions were overcome through proper awareness creations and marketing and training session.
The main obstacles in implementing this solution were as follows:

1. Resistance to Change: Key players who will be responsible in inputting the required delivery information were resistant to change of their current tried and tested method. They were skeptical on the advantages of entering all the information online, automated verification and processing. Several training sessions took place to present the idea to the key players/users and the benefits of having an online form versus the traditional method. The efficiency of completing the form, the auto-validation and integrated infant personal number generation presented great advantages to them and we were able to convince them of its use 24/7 in place of the current manual method.

2. Trust by Citizens / Lawyers: The concept of submitting an online application was quite new to the lawyers, judges and citizens. Initially lot of questions was raised on the sanctity of such processes. However, many of these were evaded due to the process redesign.

3. Security: This service had numerous integrations across different stakeholders which would access sensitive and personal data. We had to ensure that the connections did not pose any threat to the data integrity and that no external connections could breach this secure line. This obstacle was overcome by ensuring that all security standards in place within the Government Data Network were implemented and that all access points were granted based on various permissions such as IP Address, User Accounts and location of use.

(d) Use of Resources

 d.      What resources were used for the initiative and what were its key benefits? In no more than 500 words, specify what were the financial, technical and human resources’ costs associated with this initiative. Describe how resources were mobilized
The MoJ services were identified to be implemented as a part of the eGovernment strategy of Bahrain. Therefore, the resources were appropriately allocated for developing and implementing these services. The various aspects of the resource allocations are as follows:

Human resources: The team consisted of the following dedicated skill sets from eGA and MoJ working as a team
• BPR specialist to provide the As-IS and TO-BE
• Business Analyst to provide the prototype
• Technical Analyst to study the existing system in MoJ and advise on the suitable architecture
• Service Manager responsible for end to end project management of the system and in charge of business continuity
• Developer to develop the software systems
• QA and Testing team to ensure end to end quality assessment of the service.

Technical resources: The solution was designed with the existing capabilities (h/w and s/w) available with MoJ and eGA. The back end was developed at MoJ. The front end services were provisioned on the national portal of Bahrain.

Time frame: The project was completed executed in phases. The project started in August 2008 and the last service was delivered in December 2010. The total services provided are 30.

Sustainability and Transferability

  Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
The eGovernment strategy and programme is implementing over 200 eServices in collaboration with various ministries. As this is an ongoing transformation initiative each of the services developed requires a large amount of process reengineering efforts, change management, integration and development of multiple systems.
The Justice Service is one of the well integrated service connecting multiple organizations and workflows spanning across different ministries. The service is developed based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and uses web services. Therefore, any future changes / integration / scalability in terms of new features could be easily added in the service. This service development therefore acts as an example for such complex and integrated service. eGA can transfer / extend the knowhow developed through this implementation to other complex service developments and also to ministries.

Lessons Learned

 What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
The key elements were the seamless integration across various stakeholders and the increased efficiency and turnaround in providing services on a 24X7 basis. Additionally, the elimination of unnecessary steps in the processes, reducing the physical visits to the courts, online payment enablement etc. enabled in efficiency improvement. Further, the impact of efficiency in process improved the morale of MoJ staff, better image for the ministry etc.

Contact Information

Institution Name:   eGovernment Authority, Kingdom of Bahrain
Institution Type:   Government Agency  
Contact Person:   Mohamed Abdulaziz Abdulla
Title:   Head - Service Delivery  
Telephone/ Fax:   +973 17388301
Institution's / Project's Website:   +973 17387500
E-mail:   maziz@ega.gov.bh  
Address:   Al Barsha Building (Opposite Bahrain International Airport), Building no. 145, Road no. 2403, Block no. 224
Postal Code:   PO Box 75533
City:   Muharraq
State/Province:  
Country:   Bahrain

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