Newgen Software: Driving Citizen-Centric, Transparent and Efficient Governance in Public Sector

In the digital age, everything has become visible, and with that there arise a wellinformed need for transparency. This applies to the most important facets of society, such as government, which often undergoes its harshest criticisms. But transparency isn’t just an argument of ethics, it’s a challenge to the resources, methods and overall efficiency of systems utilized by the government to interact with and fulfill the needs of the people. Here in lies a need for innovation, one that requires a daring step forward into the world of citizencentric e-governance, where digitization bolsters the potential to streamline processes, increase availability, lower response times and maintain the faith of the people.

Every day, government agencies are inundated with thousands of custom requests, complaints and queries that are hard to categorize and solve with a ‘one size fits all’ approach. Many government agencies are boggled down by non-compliance to standard regulations, low productivity, manual labor processes and lack of customer-centric processes and interfaces. Stepping into e-governance initiatives, they see potential increases in how effectively citizen and business-centric processes are delivered, services are made available to the customer, documents are handled, interoperability fairs between departments, IT architecture is consolidated across agencies and process visibility is enhanced. The only thing holding them back is that many of these government agencies don’t know who they can trust to deliver a solution that’s the right fit for some of their biggest needs.

Aside from the public sector, that’s where Newgen Software, a global provider of Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Customer Communication Management (CCM), and Adaptive Case Management (ACM) finds its customers. “With 100 percent deployment success rate and a DoD 5015.2 Certification for Records Management, we give verifiable experience which can handle all the challenges that government agencies face into account,” explains Diwakar Nigam, MD and CEO, Newgen Software. Some of their services include government citizen services, government case management, Newgen Software’s Electronic Documents and Record System, and their eGov office automation. “We do this by bringing ECM, BPM, and CCM into a single platform that eliminates the integration and upgrade issues that come with most other similar products, which in turn decrease the total cost of ownership (TCO),”adds Nigam.

With Newgen’s BPM, governments can automate and optimize critical processes, and their Adaptive Case Management Solution(ACM) provides government workers tools to access contextual information and the architectural flexibility so that they can apply their domain knowledge at critical process junctures. Adaptive Case Management Solution (ACM) rely on contextual capabilities to transform resources into ‘knowledge workers’ so that government workers can make highly informed decisions. Case related information can be extremely diverse, residing across multiple participants, systems, data repositories and enterprise applications.

The parallel process environment created by ACM allows workers to retrieve and understand pertinent information, consult with subject matter experts and conduct active analysis of supporting data and content. It supports personalized workbenches for participants (based on role, preferences, access rights, and so on) and helps them make smart choices beyond rule driven automation. This helps with tasks such as fraud investigation, which enables the Fraud Bureau of the State to effectively track and manage investigation of fraud cases; grievance redressal, which captures citizen complaints and directs them to appropriate government officials for timely redressals; workers’ compensation and the management of end-to-end social welfare services such as child care and healthcare.

By combining the above case management functions with ECM and BPM, Newgen platform gives government clientele a 360 degree view that caters to Government to Citizen (G2C), Government to Business (G2B) and Government to Government (G2G) processes. Their ECM has capture and imaging, document management, social content management, record management, workflow engine, and knowledge management functions. It allows organizations to manage content lifecycle across creation, capture, storage, disposal, and enables the seamless exchange of information and interoperability across boundaries.

With 100 percent deployment success rate and a DoD 5015.2 Certification for Records Management, we give verifiable experience which can handle all the challenges that government agencies face into account

This aids functions within their Electronic Documents and Records Management System (EDRMS) such as the end to end management of content life cycle and electronic and physical record management.

Newgen’s solutions help government agencies achieve various objectives. Their government to citizen services include e-filing, e-municipal, license and permit issuance, citizen health record management, company registration, custom and export clearance, tax administration, visa processing, and vehicle registration. They also have government case management services that include grants management, dispute resolution, court case management, contract management, complaint management, project performance management, and audits & inspections.

On the other side of the coin, their eGov office automation offers clientele electronic file and correspondence management, committee and meeting management, FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) management, as well as office note creation and approval. Their EDRMS offers document management and social records management services. Depending on what the customer needs, Newgen will employ any number of these services to create a solution that performs better than most hard-coded alternatives. With this customer-centric approach, Newgen sets itself apart from the competition and creates software that ranks among some of the best in the world.

With 40+ patents, Newgen Software is a company that’s constantly pushing itself to innovate. They’re currently seeing most of their traction in five areas, one of which is social RMS and regulatory compliance (NARA) Newgen Software, helps the public sector enterprises identify their corporate reputation issues, drive social outreach, ensure regulatory compliance and manage citizen communications. They’re also seeing much of their traction in Social, Mobile, Cloud and Analytics (SMAC)—all of which have made a tremendous impact on how most enterprises work.

Much of Newgen’s success is in case management as well, as their services add contextual awareness and handles event-driven processes that involve responding to ad-hoc work and exceptions in areas such as childcare, unemployment insurance and legal case management. Newgen Adaptive Case Management was recently recognized by Gartner as one of the top 5 Case Management Frameworks available worldwide for handling case workloads and manage the business of governing at all levels-Federal, State, County and Municipal. Furthermore, their Client Communication Management (CCM) solution is popular in the public sector because it addresses a wave of modernization in state government. This brings us to another area of traction for Newgen Software, which is their illustrious clientele. These include the Department of Public Safety, DMV of New Hampshire, Financial Services Commission (Jamaica), and the state government of Victoria, Australia, among others.

So how does Newgen attain these kinds of accolades in its endeavor to reshape a public sector where most services are largely labor-intensive, paper-driven, costly, and timeconsuming? The company credits its PROagile methodology, which has been developed over the course of 20+ years of customer service, for its success. “PROagile is a polished approach that facilitates early prototyping in close correlation to the requirements definition and re-usability of prototypes for production systems resulting in quick product implementation,” acknowledges N igam a nd h e f urther a dds, “ PROagile has increased customer confidence and punctuality, which has resulted in rework reduction due to the better alignment of each prototype with the final solution. In addition, we use contemporary methods and constantly work toward providing best practices.”

Their cutting edge methods and overall drive to succeed aren’t the only things that have brought them fortune. Newgen Software’s diverse platform for government agencies, which balances attention to G2C, G2B, and G2G processes, offers enough versatility to span all departmental and administrative workflows.

The platform offers improvements in regulatory compliance, increased productivity and reduced costs. It relies on its BPM capabilities to eliminate redundancies, provide access to real-time data, make end-to-end process a reality and foster collaboration within/across government agencies.

While Newgen Software’s platform also offers strategic control over critical documents and complies with all regulations for their archival, the IT giant realizes that this isn’t enough in and of itself. Given the eclectic, job-to-job nature of their solutions, Newgen Software is unable to rely on the same solutions every time. “Certain processes such as grants management, legal case management, audits and inspections, dispute management, complaint management, and correspondence management are all circumstantial depending on the evolution and geography of each client. For this reason, we don’t rely on what may or may not be considered the ‘best industry practice’. Instead, we have developed a series of soft templates that can be altered to fit organization-specific changes that helps in redefining the standards. This leads to rapid implementation, while giving us a competitive edge through f lexibility and quickness,” explains Nigam.

Newgen Software has found success in other fields, such as imaging and digitization. Having pioneered this in India, they began when processing power was low and memory was expensive. “It was a risk to invest in building robust imaging capabilities, but eventually that become the foundation of Newgen Software’s Document Management and BPM products and solutions. Now our document imaging, capture and scanning applications go beyond normal scanning capabilities,” says Nigam. Today, organizations can use Newgen Software services to capture content from virtually any source and format, automating information extraction, indexing and classifying content, and aggregating information in a single repository, which links to other enterprise systems.

Among their many successful ventures is their foray into social media records management. Newgen Software believes that social media can be leveraged by local government for twoway communication, disseminating citizen-specific information and gathering feedback on new and existing initiatives; however, little is being done to archive the information that is exchanged by agencies over social media platforms. Newgen Software’s Record Management System helps organizations ensure compliance for both electronic and physical records management. “Our service allows organizations to classify not only paper content, but electronic documents, audio and video files, email, scanned images, social media content and webpages. Among other things, it’s another one of their daring innovations that go above and beyond to satisfy customer needs,” says Nigam.

One of Newgen Software’s big success stories was the implementation of ECM for a leading State on the East Coast in their Department of Public Safety’s (DPS) inmate records. “The Department of Combined Records was flooded with paper files of around 40,000 inmates that made up 6.6 million pages. Their files weren’t always up to date and paperwork sometimes sat for a long time before it was processed, said Anand Raman, VP Sales at Newgen Software.

“Newgen Software’s Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) not only enabled scanning, indexing, storing and document retrieval capabilities, but also gave statewide access to over 30,000 employees and various other departments. It integrated with the State Identity management portal for user management as well as the Opus Database, which houses the details of inmates. As a result the State’s DPS received a number of significant benefits such as cost reduction, faster retrieval of documents, tighter security, improved file integrity, and reduced time consumption as employees no longer had to perform manual processes.” added Raman.

So what’s next for Newgen? The company plans to invest in new technologies in the social and mobile spaces. “We want to create differentiated solutions such as social records management, and also expand our partner ecosystem, which exists in over 55 countries. Cloud is another area of focus, and the GTM partnership with key players like HP, Genpact and Amazon is definitely an added advantage,” added Rajeev Kak, VP of Industry Solutions and Center of Excellence for Newgen. The company believes that their solution roadmap will help in making government processes more transparent and effective.

With the current trend of paperbased records management changing, many government CIOs are focusing on transforming the way services are delivered to the public, while demonstrating measurable returns from IT investments. For all they contribute, Newgen Software is a company that promises to help the growth of this new progressive mindset. They’ll continue to represent success through outstanding service and their refusal to take shortcuts, and as pioneers they’ll leave an imprint that many other companies will likely follow.