Case Study: Republic of the Philippines National Statistics Office

Modernization Improves Government Service to Citizens

Imagine it.

What if you could reduce the waiting time from six days to less than one day for citizens to receive official documents such as birth, marriage and death certificates?   

Done.

The Republic of the Philippines’ National Statistics Office partnered with Unisys to reduce service time and maintain document integrity.

 “We're satisfied with our progress in building our database and in our ability to bring our services closer to the people. We receive fewer complaints from citizens, which is a good indicator. And our latest quarterly survey shows an improvement in customers' perception [of the NSO]." - Carmelita N. Ericta, NSO Administrator & Civil Registrar General

Updating technology. Enhancing service.

Most countries require citizens to provide copies of official documents such as birth, marriage and death certificates to make important transactions. For example, people may need to provide birth certificates to verify citizenship when registering for government services. Marriage certificates may be essential for women looking to change their names for passports or other official forms. Beneficiaries may need death certificates to receive payment from a loved one's life insurance policy.
 
This means citizens must have access to official documents as quickly as possible. And government agencies must be able to handle requests in a timely fashion. Such was the challenge of the National Statistics Office (NSO) of the Republic of the Philippines in the early 1990s, as the nation was becoming a more active participant in the global economy, and as the population of the Philippines began to grow. Figures from May 2000 revealed a population of 76.5 million, a 10.31 percent increase over 1995. At its current growth rate, the population will double in approximately 29 years.
 
That's a lot of people to serve. As Lourdes J. Hufana, director of the civil registration department of the NSO, observes, "The larger the population, the more documents that need to be managed."

"We saw a significant increase in the number of Filipinos requesting copies of civil registry documents for purposes of employment and travel," says Valentino C. Abuan, director of the information resources department of the NSO.  A retrieval process that was mostly manual began to limit the organization's ability to provide a high level of service.  For example, various agencies would send documents to the head office of the NSO, where employees coded the documents, entered these codes into a computer index with location information and then filed the documents. Simultaneously, the NSO was working to microfilm all documents so that workers could make copies for citizens without wear and tear on the original.
 
The NSO soon realized, however, that it would need to update its existing technology. Employees of the NSO had to manually retrieve the documents to make copies. Additionally, once citizens requested document copies via a satellite office, they had to travel to the head office in Manila to receive the document copies.  The entire process could take as long as six days -- and it was getting worse.
 
"Not long after the number of incoming requests began to swell, we experienced problems such as lack of space, physical wear and tear to documents and misfiling," says Abuan. "The daily influx of people to the NSO's service counters for civil registry services was more than our human, financial and physical resources could bear."
 
The agency began to search for a new solution that would "reduce service time and maintain the integrity of the documents," says Carmelita N. Ericta, administrator and civil registrar general of the NSO. The NSO established five primary goals:

• Enhance the delivery of services to the public.
• Manage, organize and maintain a complete and accurate database of civil registry documents and information.
• Minimize the falsification of civil registry documentsImprove the computing capability of the NSO.
• Contribute to a better life for NSO employees, who were under considerable stress in their customer service positions.

How did NSO do it?

After defining its objectives, the NSO sought the expertise of information technology solutions providers. "We knew that the problem was rooted in storage and retrieval, but we weren't sure what solution would adequately address the problem and be financially viable," confides Abuan.
 
The NSO and Unisys worked together to design a new infrastructure, dubbed the NSO - Civil Registry System Information Technology Project (NSO-CRS ITP). The plan, which was approved in April 2000, called for a new wide-area network with supporting systems and applications.  Unisys is implementing the 12-year multiphase project under the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) scheme, where Unisys builds the infrastructure and then gradually transfers management and maintenance responsibilities to the NSO. This makes the project more cost-effective for the NSO and gives its employees time to become familiar with maintaining the systems and infrastructure. The project is scheduled for completion in 2007.

According to Hufana, the NSO intends to create 40 new service centers throughout the country. Some of these sites will be new facilities. Others will involve a technology upgrade of existing facilities.  Each site will be networked to a central site, which stores all electronic information and documents. To ensure business continuity, the NSO will establish several backup facilities at remote locations.  Already, NSO has established the Central Facility, as well as the imaging and storage infrastructure. It has also established six service centers in Metro Manila and fourteen regional outlets strategically located nationwide.  All these outlets are networked to the central site.  The systems running the CRS have been tested and NSO employees for all these outlets have already been trained before site implementation.
 
With the new infrastructure, the NSO will be able to image all documents and store them electronically, so that citizens can receive copies of documents while they wait, and at the service center of their choice. The system will also house digital signatures of all city and municipal registrars to ensure the authenticity of signatures on incoming documents.

“One of the functions of the NSO is to validate signatures of local civil registry personnel," explains Hufana. "The new infrastructure will make it much easier to identify a genuine signature."

The NSO will also be able to automatically generate statistics, including population, birth rates and other information.

In order to move away from the old system as quickly as possible, the NSO has set an aggressive schedule for converting more than 120 million paper and microfilm documents to digital format, along with all incoming documents. Already it has imaged more than 60 percent of its documents; birth records from 1945 to 1999, or about 64.246 million birth records have already been converted and loaded into the CRS database.
 
The NSO is training employees in sessions that include team-building, instructor-led and hands-on exercises. According to Abuan, employees began to talk about the ease of use of the imaging solution after just a few weeks, and most now prefer it to the microfilm system.
 
"With the previous system, our employees often would not be able to go home until late in the evening [because they were finishing their work]," notes Hufana. "Now they are most often able to leave at 5 p.m. and are able to deliver better customer service."
 
The NSO is also actively educating the public about the new system and its capabilities through press releases, programs, posters, fliers, brochures and guest appearances of key officials on radio and television.
 
"Any new technology will generate some doubts or fears," observes Ericta. "We use every opportunity available to inform the public about the progress of the project."

Faster service.  Satisfied citizens.

The NSO-CRS project officially started in May 2000 with the development of the following critical components:  application and support systems that would run the CRS, the technical infrastructure, the conversion of the first batch of civil registry documents, and the redesigning of the business processes.  The first implementation of CRS came in September 2001 in the biggest outlet located in Quezon City, Philippines.  A year after Unisys began the implementation, the Philippines NSO is already beginning to see results. More than half of the 13,000 citizens who request civil registry documents every day are served through the new computerized solution, receiving copies of their important documents the day they request them, or in the morning of the following day for requests made in the afternoon.

“We're satisfied with our progress in building our database and in our ability to bring our services closer to the people," says Ericta. "We receive fewer complaints from citizens, which is a good indicator. And our latest quarterly survey shows an improvement in customers' perception [of the NSO]."

Ericta recently communicated the project's progress to the president of the Philippines and her cabinet. Ericta states that the response was very positive, with several agencies offering assistance with the next stages of the project.

"Because of the opportunities the project provides, we're now thinking about building electronic gateways for other agencies so that they can access our records. This would mean that citizens would not have to obtain copies of documents for so many transactions, and it would make things much simpler for them," says Ericta.
 
The system will also enable the NSO to provide an array of additional services, such as the tracing of family heritage. Abuan points out that such capabilities are important for enhancing the quality of the experience for the customer, and that agencies shouldn't feel that they are on their own to specify a solution that has such broad potential.

"It's best to consult the industry players for what they have to offer," he says. "There are a lot of technologies being paraded in the market, and the task of narrowing down the selection can be daunting. Present the problem to industry experts and allow them to suggest a solution. From that, you can make a guided choice of which technology to adopt."

Clearly, the NSO’s choice of Unisys as its partner has resulted in the adoption of the most effective technology for meeting the primary goals of better service to citizens and reduced stress for employees.