Assignment task:
The mayor of the city of smallville clark kent has decided to adopt the principles of open government. An open government is one with high levels of transparency and mechanism for public scrunity and oversight in place with an emphasis on government accountability. As part of his open government initiative he decided to make smallville public documents such as city council meeting agendas and minutes rules and regulations services and permits etc more readily searchable over the web. These documents originate the city's department including police fire garbage water sanitation elections management transportation electricity roads housing welfare parks and recreation and education. To achieve this objective smallville documents on the web. They hired the lowest bidder who recommended the following A single group would be created at the city whose job is to tag all city documents that are to be published on the world wide web with keywords. The keywords would be used by google and Bing to classify each document thereby enhancing the recall of the document. The group would perform the following tasks
1 Department will submit pdfs word docs and text files of reports articles bylaws etc for publication to the group via email. No additional information would need to be provided by departments about the submitted document.
2 The group has a set of specialist who will perform a relevance review.
The specialist will have a set of guidelines as to the typhes of documents that cannot be published on the web.if a document is rejected it will be returned to the submitting department.
3 The group has a set of specialist who will perform a privacy review. The specialist will have a set of guidelines as to the typhe of content that cannot be published and would have to be removed from the document. If a document contains unpublisable content its is rejected and simply return to the submitting department without comment
4 The group has a set of specialist who will translate the document into standard web format. Documents will have to translated from doc pdf etc into html document.
5 The group has a set of specialist who will perform a keyword tagging.Smallvikle has a set of subjecy keywords created by these specialist that they use to tag documents the specialist selects a subset of keywords from the list to tag the document.
6 Each document is then recieved by a supervisor to assure the quality of the task performed
7 After the document has passed the review it is published on the web.
8 The department that submitted the documents is charged for the cost of processing regardless of wther it is rejected or not.
The process above was implemented by smallville.After a period of six months clark kent met his department heads to get feedback on the process He heard the following :
The process takes too long for documents to be processed. City council meeting agendas are publicly months after the meetings.Same is true of other public notices eg bylaws changes permit requirements changes.All of these documents due to their public nature do not pose relevance nor privacy problems
The cost of processing a document is too high. Since the document processing cost of paid by the submitted department they are receiving large monthly bills.
The quality of tagging is poor. Incorrect tags were being used and the set of tags aviable do not encompass all the keywords the departments think should be used. The keyword list was created by specialist based on the city's administration internal perspective of what they do. The departments wee not asked ODG( Open documents group) to contribute to the list.
The public cannot find the documents they are searching for. They have tried various combination of keywords they thought would be relevant without success.
The ODG does not communicate with the departments. They neither request input not provide feedback. They simply accept or reject documents for publication without explanation. Departments do no know why documents are rejected other than they are not relevant or contain private information
Questions to answers
Draw the BP N diagram for AS-IS (current) process and annote with time information.State your assumptions when necessary.