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DILA

French government agency uses Hyland solutions to improve legal information and normative content processes engineering.

DILA, the department of the French government managing legal and administrative information, utilizes Hyland's Nuxeo Platform for two critical case management applications. These solutions have improved the legal information and normative content processes engineering, allowing better response times and content quality to ensure on-time delivery to citizens and government entities.

High volumes, multiple users and advanced workflows

A part of the French Prime Minister’s office, DILA is a French government entity responsible for supervising the legal processes and publishing the laws. Legal content must be regularly updated and its accuracy verified. DILA is partnering with more than 150 local administrations in France to publish public and legal information and give access to citizens.

They chose Hyland's Nuxeo Platform help them.

As a part of the legislative process, DILA also manages the questions asked to the government from the National Assembly and the Senate. Every time a session is held, members of Parliament can formally ask questions to the government on any topic. These requests can be complicated and may involve several departments or other government entities and must be formally answered within three months.

More than any government entity, DILA must face a heavily regulated environment, with an incredibly high volume of content and several thousand users. The creation, modification and maintenance of the law and norms are highly complex and involve numerous processes. The digital collaboration between different government entities wasn't always an easy task. Workflows weren't automated, and there were issues with content accuracy and quality.

At that time, DILA identified three main goals:

  • Improve quality and time of response by the government to members of Parliament
  • Improve the content production workflow for the government agencies
  • Allow content analysis and data visualization on users’ activity and performance

Highly modular and flexible applications for each process

With more than 4,200 users and 700 cases per week, the Nuxeo Platform has allowed the French government to create a successful e-government enterprise case management system.

DILA launched a new project to make the law and administrative content production and publication very easy between three different government entities: the government, the National Assembly and the Senate. The project, SOLON, is helping the three entities manage the legislative processes end-to-end. In parallel, another project, Réponses, was born. This application maintains a seamless flow of the questions and answers between members of Parliament and the administration.

With a similar architecture, the two applications are running on a Nuxeo Platform cluster composed of six application servers and backed by an Oracle database.

The Nuxeo Platform allowed us to provide our customer with a highly performant and secure case management application for the French government.

— Pierre Gachon, SWORD

Both applications are similar to mailboxes. Questions and/or documents are received and semantically analyzed (office items are also digitally transformed through a template), an automatic workflow attributes the asset to the appropriate entity, creates a case and a process is started. Once the digital content has been approved and electronically signed, the final version is published by DILA. Every case has its own roadmap, and it's entirely customizable. The application saves the complete history and changes, and the user can go back and forth between the changes. Some departments also use the REST API to integrate further with the system and offer more automation to their employees.

Security is critical, and only those employees who have clearance can access the sensitive or non-public data. A combination of permission-based (ACL) and rule-based access control, offered natively by Nuxeo Platform, implements the complex access control scheme.

One of the primary outcomes of creating these solutions is to digitally monitor and visualize the legislative activity among the various government entities.

What’s next?

The two projects are major e-government initiatives and have improved the core legal process of the French government, as well as improved relations with Parliament. These projects were aided by the SWORD Group, and the extensibility and customization of Nuxeo Platform have allowed to keep it up-to-date and answer all the legal and administrative content management issues faced by the Senate, National Assembly and the French Government.