The Ministry of Higher Education in Saudi Arabia unifies its Student e-Folder by providing a 360° view of its student files with EverSuite


The Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE - www.mohe.gov.sa) has partnered with EVER TEAM Saudi Arabia, in order to gradually introduce the EverSuite Enterprise Content Management Infrastructure as a genuine and comprehensive platform to manage “Global Content” which pertains to MOHE’s 30 Int’l offices and attachés in more than 30 different countries and cities.

Such a strategic approach addresses the notion of unifying the “Student e-Folder” accross the Globle, and of document-enabling the existing MOHE Applications, making this strategic 75-million Saudi Riyals project the largest ECM project in the Middle East.

Customer Overview

In Saudi Arabia, higher education has scored remarkable leaps both in quality and quantity. These leaps have drawn the attention of those interested in higher education affairs in various countries of the world. In this run, the Ministry of Higher Education has adopted radical changes which in turn led to a new restructuring of the universities in our dear country to adapt with the orientations of the Saudi and the international labor markets. This reconstructing is achieved across a wide range of programs and procedures, short-, medium-and long-term plans to include a number of pivots. The most notable among these pivots are mainly seven which include: the acceptance and assimilation, harmonization, quality, finance, scientific research, scholarships and finally strategic planning.

Actually, the ministry and the universities started to deal with the issue of quality from two important dimensions: firstly, raising the internal efficiency of universities by ensuring the quality of university education inputs, which was achieved by the establishment of the National Center for Assessment in Higher Education in 1421 AH. Secondly, raising the external efficiency of universities by adjusting the outputs and verifying their quality and achieving the academic and institutional accreditation of the universities. To achieve this goal, The National Commission for Assessment and Academic Accreditation (NCAAA) was established in 1424 AH to be responsible for academic accreditation and quality assurance in higher education institutions. 

Business Challenge

Challenge : Finding a robust, scalable and comprehensive Enterprise Content Management infrastructure which caters to MOHE’s global presence.

The Saudi Arabian e-Government plan (Yesser) is enforcing each government agency to use technology as a means and facilitator towards becoming more organized, productive and service oriented. The main challenge for the Ministry was to find a unified and integrated ECM infrastructure that can incorporate a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in order to seamlessly document enable its mission critical applications, as well as provide distributed document capture and publishing across the globe throughout MOHE’s international offices, and finally, provide a standard “Student Taxonomy” so that students that are studying abroad can benefit from e-Services which cater to providing a unified (360 degree) view pertaining to the student e-Folder, consolidating structured data coming from the existing MOHE Student Information Systems, as well as unstructured data which is generated through documents, forms, emails and multi-media content
 
Other main functional and technical challenges, known to many process owners and business users as “wishful thinking” were placed, such as:

  • Provide a global view regarding any business case
  • Being able to model heterogeneous and distributed data sources
  • Enhance the quality of “e-Services” that are provided to the students, through building a unified ECM repository which consolidates structured data with unstructured content
  • Acquire a fully web based and natively Arabized solution which can be easily used and customized, in order to fully adapt it to the Ministry’s culture and work habits
  • Acquire an ECM infrastructure which is robust and scalable, in terms of user volume (open license), number of remote offices (30) and deployment architecture to serve geographically distributed offices

The Solution

The Ministry of Higher Education has chosen the EverSuite infrastructure for its architectural strength, modularity and natural scalability. The project, being the first of its kind on the Kingdom and Middle East level, is addressing four main concepts, explained below:

          1. High Volume Scanning and Taxonomy:

The objective of such a technological concept is to build the student related taxonomy, in order to come up with the filing plan strategy which standardizes the categories and sub-categories of all student e-Folders across the globe (MOHE 30 international offices). In parallel to planning and developing the student taxonomy, existing (backlog) student documents at MOHE headquarters in Saudi Arabia, as well as at MOHE international offices, are being categorized, scanned, OCRed (when possible), evaluated through quality control and uploaded to the unified EverSuite ECM repository. From a business and benefits standpoint, such a concept enhances corporate governance and agility, since it provides stimulated e-Services to students and other stakeholders

          2. Document Enabling:

The EverSuite infrastructure natively utilizes a service oriented approach to ECM; in light of that, EverSuite was also used at MOHE to expose its ECM functionalities as web services, so that they can be consumed from MOHE’s mission critical legacy applications. For example, the user interface of the Student Information System (SIS) is provided with out of the box web services and connectors, allowing knowledge workers to capture, OCR, bar code, classify, and publish all documents pertaining to a student record, while taking into consideration MOHE’s corporate security directory and overall security paradigm

          3. Robust Enterprise Content Management repository:

The Ministry’s context would require an ECM infrastructure that is robust, scalable and supports federated deployments across MOHE’s international offices. EverSuite was chosen by MOHE after careful due diligence and evaluation against competing ECM platforms, such as Open Text, FileNet and Documentum. The Ministry of High Education has selected EverSuite for its robust and scalable platform which was benchmarked from both a technical and business perspective, as depicted below:

From a technical perspective:

  • The EverSuite Document repository is compliant with the MOREQ/ISO14721 standard, which hence provides secure document repositories
  • The EverSuite document repository provides a Scalable and robust repository supporting mass and large volume of documents
  • CMIS compliant repositories for exchanging documents with external ECM repositories
  • Complete support for ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) in order to address online, near line and offline storage

From a business perspective:

  • The European Union: 70,000,000 backlog documents, plus ongoing daily capture and publishing through different EU portals
  • The Ministry of Finance (France): 25,000,000 documents
  • The Jeddah Municipality: 22,000,000 documents in backlog, in addition to ongoing daily document capture and business process management
  • The Ministry of Justice (Saudi Arabia): 7,000,000 A1/A2 backlog documents, distributed through 18 different courts