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HANIS gains momentum

The Home Affairs National Identification System (HANIS) project was approved by Cabinet on 17 January 1996. What does it entail and where does it stand?

The system, which included an automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS), ID cards and system integration, was first conceived in 1993 and the aim was to enable the cross-reference of fingerprints and identification information. Cabinet also approved that two fingerprint systems would be implemented - a civil system and a separate criminal system by the criminal justice departments.

According to the Department of Home Affairs' website ( http://home-affairs.pwv.gov.za/dir_hanis.asp) "The purpose of the Directorate: HANIS is to enable the Department, through optimal utilisation of information technology, to address the service delivery requirements within the different business areas. This includes the support, maintenance and development of computerised business and identification systems, which will enable the provision of an identity service and reliable identity verification service.

The major functions of HANIS include:

* Establishment of an automated citizen identification system.

* Management of the development and maintenance of an automated fingerprint service.

* Management of the development and maintenance of an automated ID-card production facility.

* Rendering technical advice service concerning identification systems."

(More background information is available at http://home-affairs.pwv.gov.za/projects.asp)

The system went live in February 2002 but was switched off for an upgrade almost immediately. It was decided in November 2003 that the Department of Home Affairs' information technology systems needed to be revamped in order to effectively computerise its operations and HANIS would be relaunched as HANIS Reloaded.

At the time, Home Affairs director-general Barry Gilder said the new system would arrest the potential for fraud that was prevalent in the department.

He said that the resignation of key personnel on the project had left the old HANIS plagued by mismanagement, which had left a void in the running of the system.

Due to delays in the issuance of the smart ID card, the population of HANIS did not occur as expected, and it was decided that the existing hardcopy records would be converted from paper based images into digital images and subsequently absorbed into HANIS.

Enter Ideco.

"Ideco was tasked with the back-record capturing of all the existing records," explains Charlene McLaren of Ideco. "This involved sifting through all of the old records - both paper records and cards - checking the information against the population register, getting rid of any duplicates, checking that the applicants were legal South African citizens and indeed alive, and then converting everything into electronic format. Documentation was scanned, if there was a photograph that, as well as all 10 fingerprints, had to be linked to the corresponding ID number."

The mammoth task of sifting through in excess of 41 million records was undertaken by two teams of 200 people, each working an eight-hour shift, six days a week for a total of 16 months.

"It involved a lot of pre-processing in order to get the original documentation, some of which was very old, to a state that it could be scanned. Also, the teams had to keep track of information so that if a person needed, for example, an emergency passport, the form required could be found without having to be searched for and then returned to the correct stage of the process.

"After updating and converting all the information and identifying that a card had to be issued, the application was placed in a queue for processing since the HANIS system could not process the records at the speed at which they had been captured and converted - which at peak was 120 000 a day," says McLaren.

The full conversion of the backlog of applications took 16 months, which included ongoing training of staff and wrap-up periods. "And 1047 previously unemployed people that were trained for this project have since been employed in both the government and private sectors," McLaren concludes.

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