Organization of American States Quickly Processes Thousands of Human Rights Petitions Using Enterprise Content Management Solution
 
 

Organization of American States Quickly Processes Thousands of Human Rights Petitions Using Enterprise Content Management Solution

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The Organization of American States (OAS) is the world’s oldest regional organization, dating back to the First International Conference of American States, held in Washington, D.C., October 1889 to April 1890. It brings together all 35 independent states of the Americas and is the primary political, judicial, and social government forum in the Western Hemisphere.

OAS works to achieve peace and justice among member states, promote their solidarity, strengthen collaboration, and defend state sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence. Five main pillars––democracy, human rights, security, internal development, and interAmerican cooperation––form the foundation of its work.

An important part of OAS’ mission focuses on human rights advocacy, which is carried out via the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). The commission receives more than 1,500 petitions every year and handle, at any given time, a docket of more than 8,000 cases. These complex cases often involve boxes of documentation, which IACHR routed manually throughout the organization, making it difficult to determine the status of a petition, presenting security risks, and slowing processing for a growing number of cases.

In 2010, OAS deployed Oracle WebCenter Content for IACHR to automate and expedite petition and case processing. Since that time, it has improved processing efficiency, extended visibility into petition status, and increased security around critical documents. After achieving a significant return on investment in the early stages of deployment, OAS began plans to extend the implementation to enable petitioners and other stakeholders to track cases and access critical documentation online.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Organization of American States

  • “We needed to efficiently capture, secure, and distribute digital and paper-based documents throughout the lifecycle of thousands of human rights cases, and only Oracle WebCenter Content could meet our complex workflow requirements. We’ve turned petition documents into intellectual assets, improved collaboration and security, and achieved an impressive return on investment.” – Juan José Goldschtein, Chief Information Officer, Organization of American States

  • Manage more efficiently large volumes of documentation associated with the thousands of human rights cases that IACHR handles annually for individuals in OAS-member states
  • Accelerate petition processing
  • Improve visibility into case status so that IACHR can provide on-demand updates to petitioners and other stakeholders
  • Reduce security risks associated with routing paper-based petition files for internal review
  • Complete the implementation within two years to meet funding requirements

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Deployed Oracle WebCenter Content to help IACHR automate and accelerate processing petitions and cases related to potential human rights violations in the Americas
  • Gained the ability to efficiently and securely manage 1,500 new human rights petitions each year as well as 8,000 ongoing petitions―many containing a significant amount of unstructured data
  • Improved efficiency in receiving, managing, and routing case files―which can range from a single page to boxes of information received from petitioners, the 35 member states, and nongovernmental organizations
  • Replaced IACHR’s paper-based environment with digitized documents and automated workflows, improving traceability and visibility, as well as accelerating petition processes
  • Accommodated a very complex environment that encompasses more than 17 custom workflows in four languages―Spanish, English, Portuguese, and French―and more than 100 workflow security rules based on geography, stakeholder conflict of interest and more
  • Provided IACHR with a secure digital information system for sensitive human rights case information, ultimately improving reliability and information sharing across the organization
  • Improved ability to quickly provide information on petition status to authorized representatives, as well as petitioners, who might have to travel hours to reach a phone to contact IACHR for an update
  • Increased IACHR data storage capacity by 206%, from 30,260 to 62,208 documents, in the first four months of operation, and captured more than 150,000 documents by December 2011
  • Prepared plans to expand implementation to enable petitioners and other authorized parties to gain online access to case information, with the goal of a faster and almost paperless system that helps protect more than 700 million people across the 35 member states
  • Implemented the extensive system in two years, meeting the requirements for a grant that funded the initiative
  • Worked with Oracle University to effectively train users on the Oracle WebCenter Content platform
  • Received international recognition for the implementation, including being named a 2011 Computerworld Honors Program Laureate in recognition of the IT project’s potential to support positive social change, and the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) 2011 Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Award in the midsize organization category

Why Oracle

“We worked with Gartner to define 150 different selection criteria and analyzed all available content management solutions. Oracle WebCenter Content rose above the competition because of its built-in and sophisticated workflow, service-oriented architecture, core service robustness, and data reliability. We have a very complex workflow, with more than 100 security rules governing our processes. Only Oracle could handle that complexity,” said Juan José Goldschtein, chief information officer, Organization of American States.

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