Assignment task:
The mayor of the City of Smallville, Clark Kent, has decided to adopt the principles of Open Government. An Open Government is one with high levels of transparency and mechanisms for public scrutiny and oversight in place, with an emphasis on government accountability. As part of his open government initiative he decided to make Smallville's public documents, such as city council meeting agendas and minutes, rules and regulations, services and permits, etc. more readily searchable over the Web. These documents originate the city's departments including: Police, Fire, Garbage, Water, Sanitation, Elections management, Transportation, Electricity, Roads, Housing, Welfare, Parks and Recreation, and Education. To achieve this objective, Smallville published a Request for Proposal for defining a process for publishing Smallville's documents on the web. They hired the lowest bidder who recommended the following: A single group (ODG: Open Documents Group) would be created at the City whose job is to tag all City documents that are to be published on the World Wide Web with keywords. The keywords would be used by Google and Bing to classify each document, thereby enhancing the recall of the document. The group would perform the following tasks:
1. Departments will submit pdfs, word docs, and text files of reports/articles/bylaws etc. for publications to the group via email. No additional information would need to be provided by departments about the submitted document.
2. The group has a set of specialists who will perform a Relevance Review. The specialists will have a set of guidelines as to the types of documents that cannot be published on the web. If a document is rejected, it will be returned to the submitting department.
3. The group has a set of specialists who will perform a Privacy Review. The specialists will have a set of guidelines as to the types of content that cannot be published and would have to be removed from the document. If a document contains unpublishable content, it is rejected and simply returned to the submitting department without comment.
4. The group has a set of specialists who will translate the document into standard web format. Documents will have to be translated from .doc, .pdf, etc. into an HTML document.
5. The group has a set of specialists who will perform a Keyword Tagging. Smallville has a set of subject keywords, created by these specialists, that they use to tag documents. The specialist selects a subset of keywords from the list to tag the document.
6. Each document is then reviewed by a supervisor to assure the quality of the tasks performed.
7. After the document has passed the review, it is published on the web.
8. The department that submitted the document is charged for the cost of processing, regardless of whether it is rejected or not.
The process above was implemented by Smallville. After a period of six months, Clark Kent met with his department heads to get feedback on the process. He heard the following:
The process takes too long for documents to be processed. City Council Meeting Agendas are published months after the meetings. Same is true of other public notices, due to their public nature, do not pose relevance nor privacy problems.
The cost of processing a document is too high. Since the document processing cost is paid by the submitting department, they are receiving large monthly bills.
The quality of the tagging is poor. Incorrect tags were being used , and the set of tags available do not encompass all of the keywords the departments think should be used, The keyword list was created by specialists, based on the city administrations' internal perspective of what they do. The departments were not asked by the ODG to contribute to the list.
The public cannot find the documents they are searching for. They have tried various combinations of keywords they thought would be relevant without success.
The ODG does not communicate with the departments. They neither request input nor provide feedback. They simply accept or reject documents for publication without explanation. Departments do not know why documents are rejected other than they are not relevant or contain private information.
Questions:
Q1. Draw the BPMN diagram for the AS-IS (current) process and annotate with time information. State your assumptions when necessary.
Q2. Redesign the process and the underlying Information Technology. Describe each step and rationalize the design changes by referencing the Information Technology. Process redesign heuristics, Lean and Six Sigma methods that motivated them.