The Challenge
Australian Federal Government agency setup to provide a mechanism of external review of decisions made by Centrelink and the Child Support Agency. Many forms are used by both applicants and the agency staff.
Often these forms were manually filled in then either stored as a paper based system or re-entered into the Agency’s IT systems. Alternatively, seperate projects were required to create forms for online delivery and data capture. Creation of any required forms often took time, requiring IT and/or other staff involvement.
Integration with existing IT systems was inadequate as the forms are stored as pdf documents. The agency was after a simpler method for creating and distributing these forms and capturing the resulting data.
The Solution
Immediately on product release of Lotus Forms 3.0 in late 2007, the SSAT engaged Hyperware to complete one of the few Lotus Forms implementations to be combined with WebSphere Portal and Lotus Domino.
A composite application was created using a Service-oriented Architecture which enables business users to:
- Quickly and easily design complex, rich, intuitive forms to organisational web standards;
- Route the forms for management approval before publishing;
- Deliver the forms through a browser to users;
- Have the forms automatically populated with data from backend systems, including using the JavaScript API with AJAX calls to web services to provide reactive data which dynamically changed field display and data options dependent on end-user input;
- Have data validated on the browser pre-submission reducing the likelihood of missing or invalid data;
- Have a copy of the data submitted by the form user rendered as entered for audit purposes; and
- Have the securely submitted, digitally signed data automatically delivered to the required IT system/s for further processing and workflow routing.
The Result
The implementation has streamlined the process of creating and publishing forms for the agency. This was the first time the agency had engaged Hyperware Consulting.
The success of the project for internal services such as asset transfer and legal advice requests means we are now implementing it for an external, highly sensitive service requiring integration with an existing business application.
