Abstract
Purpose
Many organisations, including professional councils, operate manually to ensure document flow to clients and stakeholders. This results in the loss of valuable documentation such as certificates and the incurring of costs due to the returning of post to the sender. The purpose of this study was to explore digital transformation of document flow at the South African Council for Social Science Professionals.
Design/methodology/approach
The methodological approach involved qualitative data collected through interviews, observation and document analysis in response to research questions. The study was a participatory action research project that involved collaboration between researchers and study participants in defining and solving the problem through needs assessment exercise. All three phases of participatory action research were followed, namely, the “look phase”: getting to know stakeholders so that the problem is defined on their terms and the problem definition is reflective of the community context; the “think phase”: interpretation and analysis of what was learned in the “look phase” and the “act phase”: planning, implementing, and evaluating, based on information collected and interpreted in the first two phases.
Findings
The study identified various issues relating to poor data quality, high rate of registered postal returns and non-delivery electronic messages that cannot reach all the intended recipients and accumulation of data for decades. In this regard, the study proposes a framework that can be used by SACSSP to update and verify their details on the portal, as well as digital certificates for membership.
Research limitations/implications
Although the proposed framework is tailor-made for the professional council, it is not depended on prescribed technologies due to usage of open standards that can be used by industry and researchers. Therefore, it can be applied in other context where institutions such as universities communicate with many clients via postal or courier services.
Originality/value
The study used participatory action research involving the researchers and the organisation to solve the problem. The study presented a workflow that the council can use to ensure that the documents reach intended recipients. Furthermore, digital transformation of the process will ensure that the registered professionals are able to access their certificates online and can print them when necessary.
Keywords
Citation
Chauke, T.A. and Ngoepe, M. (2024), "End-to-end digital transformation for document flow at a professional council in South Africa", Global Knowledge, Memory and Communication, Vol. 73 No. 1/2, pp. 123-141. https://doi.org/10.1108/GKMC-09-2021-0145
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2022, Tshepo Arnold Chauke and Mpho Ngoepe.
License
Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
Figures
Figure 1.
Mail workflow (Stangle, 2017)
Figure 2.
QR code example
Figure 3.
QR process flow (Baik, 2012, p. 7)
Figure 4.
Returned documents
Figure 5.
Notice posted on the website
Figure 6.
Sample practice card
Figure 7.
Sample of proposed phone USSD-based contacts update interface
Figure 8.
Workflow for details verification
Data quality components
| Component | Component explanation |
|---|---|
| Parsing | Separation of data and parsing it into a structured format |
| Standardisation | Determination of the placement of data in each field and ensuring its storage in standardised format |
| Validation | Ensuring the consistency of data against the pre-set validation rules |
| Verification | It involves checking of data against a source of verified information |
| Matching | It identifies duplicate records and merges those records correctly |
Source: Zikopoulos et al. (2013, p. 228)
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Corresponding author
About the authors
Tshepo Arnold Chauke is Deputy Director in Information Technology at the National Department of Transport in South Africa. He was previously an Assistant Director at the Department of Public Enterprise responsible for information technology. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of South Africa. He holds masters’ degree in Information Science from the University of South Africa. His research interests are in information technology, blockchain technology, information governance, enterprise content management, digital transformation and cloud storage.
Mpho Ngoepe is a Professor in the Department of Information Science at the University of South Africa (Unisa). Prior to his current position at Unisa, Prof Ngoepe has worked for the United Nations Children’s Fund, Auditor-General South Africa and the National Archives of South Africa. Prof Ngoepe is serving in the National Committee of the South African Society of Archivists (2009–2021) and the board of Eastern and Southern Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives (2009–2019) as the editor of the journals. He also served on the advisory council of the National Archives of South Africa in his capacity as the chairperson of Gauteng Provincial Archives (2015–2020). He was the director of the African Team for the multi-national, interdisciplinary research project exploring issues concerning digital records called the International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES Trust) (2013–2018).