Summary
The client, Department of Home Affairs’ duties and responsibilities of Affairs stem from the South African Constitution, various legislation, as well as other policy documents. The Department’s services are divided into two broad categories, Civic Services and Immigration Services.
Business Challenge
Due to the vast array of information collated from each of its departments, information kept piling up and multiple silos holding redundant data produced manageability and cost overrun issues. A single system was not present to streamline the information flow and dissemination. This resulted in loss of productivity, poor handling of priority issues and information overload. As the time passed by, dependencies on those who managed this information grow making a security issue imminent. The department decided to make the process seamless across entities.
Project Highlights
C Ahead decided to implement an systems integration approach using the Enterprise service bus (Message broker) for message transformation, mediation and routing. The ESB exposed services for different operations and generated output files for processing onto the organization’s enterprise software system. The primary transport layer was IBM WebSphere MQ series that provided guaranteed delivery of message to the system. We also enabled an internal monitoring framework that helps the customer to track processing of files throughout the system. The entire approach was documented and a process flow was created. Rights to specific system configuration tools were put in place and a systems roadmap was created.
Benefits – These are the inputs we gathered as useful
- Reduced cycle times thereby reducing operating expenses
- Improved customer service
- Facilitated third party software integration resulting in optimized investments
- Improved people productivity and response to special business conditions
- Conforming to industry best practices helped achieve results faster
Learnings – These are the inputs we gathered as useful
- Choosing the appropriate architecture for your application is key
- Non-functional requirements are useful as they describe the performance and system characteristics of the application
- There must be a process to manage multiple vendors in a single IT environment