Digital Transformation of Religious Affairs Application Process in Colombia's Ministry of Interior

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Public Cloud
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

• Cities & Municipalities
• Paper & Pulp

• Quality Assurance

• Inventory Management
• Leasing Finance Automation

• System Integration

The Ministry of the Interior of Colombia faced significant challenges in managing the administrative procedures related to religious entities. The issues were common to paper-based administrative management that required multiple actions and involved extensive documentation with many variations and exceptions. The geographical conditions of Colombia, with its vast area, mountain ranges, tropical forests, and significant rural population, posed additional difficulties for administrative proceedings. The procedures related to the recognition of religious entities as legal entities, statutory reform logs, legal representative updates, changes of address, and many others, required updating or the creation of a record in the Public Registry of Non-Catholic religious entities. These procedures could take longer than a month to complete and were costly and complicated for the applicant, often requiring them to travel long distances. Furthermore, maintaining updated information in the public record was challenging, leading to misinformation and duplication problems.

The Ministry of the Interior of Colombia is responsible for the Internal sector which involves other Affiliated and Related Entities; Religious Affairs is amongst their mission areas. The Ministry is in charge of managing a large volume of documents and information related to the religious entity procedures. These procedures include their recognition as a legal entity, statutory reform logs, legal representative updates, changes of address, and many others. All these procedures require updating or the creation of a record in the Public Registry of Non-Catholic religious entities protected by the Ministry of Interior. The Ministry serves over 5000 religious entities, which, according to the figures estimated by the Interior’s Public Information Bureau (OIPI), agglomerate over 10 million parishioners.

The Ministry of the Interior of Colombia implemented its Religious Affairs application process on the AuraQuantic iBPMS platform. This required substantial changes to the way work was managed and the development of an understanding of the new way of working within the entity. The Religious Affairs Case Management is complex and requires the combined execution of six processes and 44 subprocesses. Of the 171 tasks that make up the set of coordinated processes, only 21 are performed by people, while the remaining 150 tasks are performed without any human intervention, resulting in a high degree of automation. These automated flows enable the monitoring, control, and analysis of every process and every transaction made. The project was achieved in less than 3 months, from gathering information, implementation through to production, and the stabilization and optimization adjustment phase took 4 months. The platform meets the needs of legal representatives from over 5000 religious entities, which agglomerate over 10 million parishioners.

• The Automation Project for Religious Affairs procedures was completed without programming a single line of code, resulting in an 80% reduction in work (time/cost) and also helped and guided the team to achieve a high level of modeling. The most important benefit of the project was the fact that, with technical support, the functional department was able to repeatedly modify the processes in a matter of minutes, whenever errors or possible improvements were detected. This capacity can be used for all modifications and optimizations throughout the entire useful life of the processes. The work coordination and especially the automation have drastically reduced the amount of errors made in the process. As all regulations are included in the process execution, it guarantees compliance with all internal and external mandatory regulations, with the consequent reduction in risk exposure. In addition to the quantifiable benefits, the implantation of the automatic system for Religious Affairs procedures, there are other benefits that, although may not be quantifiable, are just as important, such as: closing the gap between the government and the citizens, The fight against corruption, Transparency, Less Paperwork, Optimization of civil servant activities.

• The average completion time for the entire process has reduced from 15 days to 1 minute.
• The average management costs have been reduced by 80%.
• The errors have been reduced by 98%.