Fairfax Custom Coding and IBM Case Manager help automate the State Regulations Process

The Secretary of the State (SOTS), Department of Administrative Services (DAS) and the Bureau of Enterprise Systems and Technology (BEST) seek the help of Fairfax Data Systems.

The Need

The State of Connecticut was looking to automate their regulations making process (the process by which a proposed regulation becomes a state law). In their existing process, there were many pain points:

• Regulations were on line, but not in a very user friendly format
• Regulations used Manual Type Settings: Time Consuming and used Old Technology.
• The Connecticut Law Journal was only being printed about every 6 months, and was not widely available.
• There was NO central coordination in place for regulations to ensure quality control, consistency or accuracy of the individual regulations
• There was NO official review of documents submitted to the Secretary of State (SOTS) by agencies to review changes required by the Regulation Review Committee

The Solution

The Fairfax eRegs Solution incorporated IBM Case Manager (ICM), a web portal application and a 3rd party authoring and publishing component to address the State's pain points. ICM also works with a public facing web portal to allow the public (and anyone) a view of any proposed regulation as it moves through the proposal and approval process. The portal establishes an intuitive public interface for accessing regulatory content, enables text based searching, and facilitates public participation in the regulatory process through commenting. It also allows public users to subscribe to email notifications to facilitate communications.

The Benefit

The current Fairfax eRegulations solution now provides a transparent interactive portal with search and browse capabilities where members of the public can now submit comments, track proposed regulations and subscribe to email notifications. State regulations are now available to be seen from the time of publishing for public intent, through the entire regulation process (codification).

The launch of this new site is a major step forward for open government,” said State Secretary, whose office will maintain the new eRegulations website. “Today, we are making an important part of our laws more readily available to the public, academia, the business community, and the bar. It’s also incredibly valuable because it shows the history of the regulation making process, and allows public comment during that process. Our goal is to make these agency regulations easy to find, easy to search, and easy to navigate….”