RedTurtle Technology supplied Ferrara Province with an innovative groupware solution for the management of the General Affairs Office, the office dealing with matters relative to administrative and jurisdictional activities of the Provincial Administration, and in particular the office managing the workflow of administrative documents from all the other offices in the organization. The solution, called “Quasar / Scrivania Virtuale” (Italian for “virtual desktop”) displays the following features:

• the integration of three vertical Lotus Domino document-oriented applications:
• Gestione Protocollo (“Protocol Management”), a quite articulated system for the management of any Public Administration mail. Each and every incoming or outcoming mail (in digital or physical format) is numbered (this unique number, “numero di protocollo”, will legally identify the item nationwide) and classified according to a national standard classifier,
• Gestione Atti (“Decisional Acts Management”) like “Delibere” and “Determine” (meaning “resolutions” with different undertones) are the public decisions about any activity implying expenditure of public money or affecting citizen’s life in any way (from the temporary closure of a public building to an increase in taxes or the appointment of a new city manager).
• Gestione Grigio (“Gray management”) – the unofficial term of “Grigio” (the gray color refers to an undecided final destination of the document) refers to those document that move among different people within the organization, and that may end as “protocol” items or be filed as attachment to decisional acts. The “gray” documents are typically associated with projects of varying content, rather than with the standard processes and procedures of the organization.
• A strong integration with the organization’s standard procedures: the Ferrara Province has been certified as compliant with UNI EN ISO 9001:2000 Quality Management standards, and this implies a pervasive presence of Quality Management Procedures mapping every process. This integration is achieved by the definition of apposite kinds of “pratica” (a term that may be loosely translated as “dossier” o “workflow”, or better as “thread”). A “tipo di pratica” (“dossier type”) is a specific process, a specific workflow.
• A Domino interface called “Scrivania Virtuale” (“Virtual Desktop”), used for:
• the monitoring of dossiers/workflows specific of the office where the application user belongs (and he/she  may also monitor “pratiche” assigned to different offices)
• the real-time access to the content of each dossier/workflow, regardless of its physical collocation (“protocol”, decisional acts or “gray”)
• the monitoring of the state of every document, whatever the dossier/workflow and the serving application (“protocol”, decisional acts or “gray”)

This solution does indeed represent well the groupware potential of Lotus Domino. The complexity derives from the coexistence of four different point of views  for each document:

• State (like “proposed”, “approved” and so on): In any given state, one can find documents from different applications, from different dossiers/workflows, from different offices.
• Containing dossier/workflow: a dossier can travel through different offices and contain documents from any application, each one with its state.
• Generator application: any application (“Gray management” in particular) can generate documents in any state, in any office, and concerning different dossiers/workflows.
• Office: any office can manage documents generated by any application, dossier/workflow and state.

The multiple viewpoints described above require a specific “observatory” offering different perspectives. We call “Virtual Desktop” the Domino interface used for accessing the items in charge to its office. The Virtual Desktop displays in real time the daily jobs of each user, both in form of “gray” documents and of dossiers/workflows. Available groupings include:

• competence (document of mine, document of my office)
• urgency (urgent, important, not important)
• application (“Protocol”, Decisional Acts, “Gray”)

The cross-view provided by the Virtual Desktop is invaluable in terms of handiness and efficiency.

Some details about the “gray” documents

The utilization of Quasar/ Virtual Desktop also for the management of “unstructured” documents laying outside the standard applications may seem obvious, but in fact it required a significant amount of work for the just-in-time integration of those documents with the “structured” application. The metaphor that best describes such an integration, is the coexistence of railroads (fixed routes) and streets with cars roaming (variable routes), with the opportunity for any car to get on a train, and under crossings to avoid interference among the two kind of routes.

All those documents concerning matters whose course cannot be pre-configured, can come into existence and disappear without needing the definition of a dedicated dossier/workflow, other documents rebound among offices, growing in complexity, before finding their final collocation into a dossier/workflow or as attachment to a decisional act, or before being sent as outbound “protocols”.

Rights management

The extensive and flexible collaboration model requires a diffuse management of document access rights. Each user is responsible of managing, assigning, revoking rights for any document. This result was obtained thanks to the deep customization of the standard Lotus Domino security management, and with extensive training of the operators.

Process reselling

Lotus Domino is very well suited for the strong implementation of a process/procedure, that in this case is associated with a specific “dossier type”. The main benefits of a process-based implementation are the following:

• “Wizard effect”: the Domino application guides the user through a sequence of steps, preventing omissions
• “Quality effect”: the Domino application represent an actual implementation of the organization’s management policies. If the organization has a full-flared Quality Management System, the software achieves what the Quality Manual promises. If the organization has no formal quality management, it equally benefits form the process-based management.
• “Speed effect”: the exact knowledge of which kind of document must be generated or which action must be taken in each workflow step, lets simple actions like mouse clicks and “drag-and-drops” have complex effects like the one-click creation of a document populated with the right data at the right time.
• “Puzzle effect”: the Intranet integration creates an open and collaborative system, where each application and each document are like interconnecting tiles in a bigger picture. The completion of each workflow step can automatically generate e-mails or information flows towards third-party applications.

Another benefit for the organization derives from the opportunity of selling consulting services: with a Domino platform like Quasar at disposal, procedure / process design can be an asset for any organization, as long as process implementation can be replicated and transferred to other customers.