On December 22, the first release of the IBA-developed interdepartmental system of electronic document management for Belarusian public authorities (ISEDM) successfully passed the acceptance testing. Nikolai Pantelei, Belarusian Minister of Communications and Informatization, signed the acceptance test report. Since 2008, IBA has been developing the system based on Chancellor, the IBA proprietary software product. On January 1, 2011 IBA put the system in commercial operation at 78 public institutions of Belarus.

The project was implemented at the request of the Ministry of Communications and Informatization of the Republic of Belarus as a part of the national program E-Belarus.

The project was aimed at:

• Improving information exchange between public authorities of the Republic of Belarus
• Raising efficiency of remote information resources
• Raising operational flexibility of management decisions
• Replacing paperwork with electronic document management

The IBA responsibilities included:

• Gaining information and providing preliminary and detailed analysis of the processes subject to automation. Based on the results, creation of the scientific report “Inspection of the objects of public authorities and other organizations that are included in the system of interdepartmental electronic document management of the Republic of Belarus”
• Development of server-end and client-end software
• Integration of the Chancellor-based automated system “Workflow” with the EDM system “Record” at the Executive Office of the Council of Ministers
• Creation of the information security system (ISS) of ISEDM, including creation of more than 230 documents required for the ISS testing and security certification of ISEDM.
• Security certification of ISEDM.

During the project implementation a necessity emerged to automate the process of verifying and certifying of electronic digital signature (EDS) provided by different encryption software. For that purpose, IBA developed a module for automated verification and certification.

As a result, IBA developed a single information space for 78 distributed Belarusian public institutions including the Administration of the President, the Council of Ministers, all ministries, the Minsk Executive Committee, all local executive committees, and the National Bank of Belarus.

The 1st release of ISEDM provides:

• Information exchange between departmental electronic workflow systems of the Administration of the President and the Executive Office of the Council of Ministers using EDS
• Interdepartmental electronic workflow between subscriber stations of state governing bodies (chancelleries)
• Higher operational flexibility of management decisions.

The second release of the project includes roll-out to more than 200 organizations. Development and implementation of the second stage of the secure interdepartmental EDM system stipulates a full-scale interaction of the system with the internal workflow systems of these organizations, including the use of EDS of different encryption providers.

It is planned that the system’s functionality will be expanded and the subscriber list will include up to 7000 Belarusian governing bodies and organizations.

Eventually, it will become possible to start the creation of an integrated information system of the state governing bodies based on the “one window” principle.

The further development of the system will allow for:

• Exchanging information between all Belarusian governing bodies
• Analyzing the after–effects of decision-making
• Receiving integrated data on the current state of national economy
• Exchanging information on-the-fly and guaranteeing confidentiality within the intranet mail service
• Ensuring backup and archiving of the information.