The Public Authority for Civil Information (PACI), Kuwait
            

The Public Authority for Civil Information (PACI) is Kuwait’s central civilian authority. Responsible for a range of government services, PACI serves both Kuwaiti citizens and foreigners, as well as a range of government agencies and ministries in Kuwait. PACI employs close to 1,400 personnel and is located in Surra within Kuwait City. However, a lack of consistent standards and documentation over the years led to key business and technical knowledge being siloed and dependent on a few seasoned employees. PACI needed control over its own knowledge and systems, as well as to streamline increasing inefficiencies. By leveraging Software AG, the organization modernized and implemented changes that continue to benefit the user experience.

PACI is responsible for managing a wide breadth of civic information—including personal identity and family information, building and residential data, credit history, and resident status. PACI is also expected to make changes and implement new Kuwaiti decrees regarding residency and other civilian matters in a timely manner.

For over 25 years, PACI has depended on its stable Adabas and Natural mainframe systems and applications to manage Kuwait’s civic information. However, a gradual erosion of its technical knowledge base and business process expertise over time, combined with insufficient documentation and inconsistent change management practices, has led to a deterioration of business control and agility.

PACI was at a critical juncture. Implementing new decrees and user requests took too long, and minor system updates or other efforts to modernize were deemed increasingly risky. PACI’s Director General, Musad Al-Asousi knew that in order to move PACI forward, the team must first have control over its information, especially before any major changes could be considered. “We had to capture and centralize key PACI knowledge that had become disjointed or lost, as well as enable team collaboration and improve communications organization-wide,” said Samer Ghanim, IT Expert.

“We knew that our systems and applications themselves weren’t the issue,” said Ghanim. “It was the lack of workable information about them that was limiting us. You cannot improve something when you do not understand the process.”

A systemic transformation

This is where PACI turned to Software AG’s ARIS and webMethods.

In phase one of its systems reformation, PACI implemented ARIS, a leading business process analysis and management software solution. ARIS enabled PACI to document its end-to-end business processes, moving legacy knowledge that was trapped within specific individual employees into a company-wide knowledge base. This democratized valuable knowledge and gave the business the visibility they were sorely lacking.

“Using ARIS enables us to leverage our business and system knowledge effectively,” said Ghanim. “Now we can clearly see and manage our business process and transactions. We can plan with far greater certainty, because we are able to rapidly analyze the impact of proposed changes before implementation.”

As phase two of its transformation strategy, PACI implemented webMethods, an integration tool that delivered what Ghanim calls his proudest achievement yet—a connected PACI Integration Platform. Leveraging on the documentation and transparency made possible by ARIS, PACI were able to use webMethods to make it easy to share and explore data internally, increasing efficiency and reducing data silos.

“With the help of ARIS and webMethods, we were able to regain control over our environment,” said Ghanim. “These tools helped us establish a structure and system that allows us to act independently as an organization.”

A transparent, integrated, and scalable system

Mapping business knowledge for all

Using Software AG’s ARIS suite, PACI’s team of system and business analysts successfully mapped more than 70 key service delivery processes. This was the first ever end-to-end documentation of PACI’s processes, and it empowered the entire organization. Where they previously had to check with the specific long-time employees who had internalized this knowledge, employees could now look up each process on their own to find out key details such as the business owner, the steps in the process and mandatory documents. “We have saved a huge amount of time and greatly increased our enterprise-wide foundation of knowledge,” said Al-Asousi.

Technological transparency

Using ARIS, PACI also mapped and documented the technical elements that support each of the service delivery processes—a total of 400 transactions and 1,400 objects. This allowed PACI developers to clearly see and manage each process stream, with a clearer understanding of the impact of the proposed changes.

With this new visibility, they could quickly identify which transactions should be changed and the underlying objects that would be affected. They could also easily determine where the code needed to be streamlined, as well as easily identify who had last updated something and when.

“The number one thing ARIS has provided us is transparency. We no longer need to dig into the code itself to extract a piece of information or execute a change, fix or debug. Everything can be done through ARIS in a few clicks,” said Ghanim.

Increased developer efficiency

The improved documentation, standards and processes have greatly increased developer productivity and teamwork.

“Analyzing the impact of a change used to take a developer up to several hours; now it averages at about 70 percent faster,” said Ghanim. “It is also easier for developers to make changes in far less time, and the centrally shared documentation enables everyone to work better together. No longer is vital business and technical information obscured or limited to just a few key people.”

Using ARIS as an enterprise management system has given PACI visibility across the business and all its systems. It has enabled PACI to better design, analyze, optimize and communicate business processes to increase efficiency.

“Previously, we used to have to do a lot of trial and error, but now I can see exactly what components need to be changed within ARIS,” said Al-Asousi. “Figuring out the problem used to take a week, but now it takes just one working day.”

Integrated systems

After establishing its knowledge base within ARIS, PACI launched stage two of its technological transformation—internal integration. By using Software AG’s webMethods, PACI was able to achieve internal integration between its systems as well as the sharing of data with other PACI systems and partners, in a way that was efficient and scalable.

While it used to take PACI a week—and a lot of tedious work—to integrate with a partner manually, it can now achieve the same integration within 48 hours. “It now takes the same 48 hours regardless of the size of the service,” says Ghanim. “We just hook it up with the adapter, generate the service, publish it, and send it to the customer for consumption.”

With webMethods, PACI has been able to reduce complexity significantly, and thus accelerate its integration processes and increase customer satisfaction.

The PACI Integration Platform

Most importantly, the combination of ARIS and webMethods has empowered PACI to develop a groundbreaking platform that the team is very proud of—the PACI Integration Platform (PIP). The PACI Integration Platform has become the digital backbone that enables the level of agility and resilience that PACI has today. The platform is a combination of models, architecture, services and processes—all of which come together to facilitate a truly connected organization. "It's like an open source environment. Every single team member has access to all the models, documents and code across all our systems. We no longer run the risk of having silo-ed information or single points of failure. Information is now democratized, transferred from individuals to a transparent, integrated system."

Laying the path for the future

Using ARIS to make all technical and business documentation centrally available has enabled PACI to apply standardization, development, and change management best practices. This has significantly improved the success rate of production changes—now 80 percent and rising.

The streamlined integrations process enabled by webMethods has also led to increased efficiency and customer satisfaction. Most importantly, the PACI Integration Platform has brought about the end-to-end transparency that Ghanim had always dreamed of for his organization.

“Amazing things have happened at PACI with the optimization of our systems,” said Ghanim. “Now we spend our time analyzing what needs to be done, instead of looking for information. My developers are happier, they enjoy their work, and overall productivity has increased significantly.”

“This is just the beginning,” said Al-Asousi, “Our entire organization is now equipped to better support PACI’s strategic vision and commitment to service excellence. Our path to the future is open.”