Office of Film and Literature Classification

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Fujitsu gets top rating for OFLC e-system

In a world of saturation media, of megaplex movie theatres, wall-to-wall Internet sites and computer games and the revitalisation of book publishing, there was no rest for the Commonwealth Government's Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC).

Amid continuing community concern about the materials available to children and a new regime for classifying Web content, its workload was already on an upwards climb. Meanwhile the sponsors of new movies, books and Web sites were impatient to get their decisions quicker in response to an increasingly competitive media market.

The OFLC asked Fujitsu to analyse its business and recommend an electronic solution to allow it to function more effectively in its changing environment. The result is Business Operations Support System (BOSS), a pervasive e-system which not only revolutionises internal classification workflow but also gives all stakeholders - publishers and film distributors as well as the classifiers and their administrative staff - Internet access to the progress of an individual request. With the status of classifications visible on the Web, clients and the public need less telephone contact with OFLC staff who in turn can be redirected towards what they do best - viewing and classifying material in line with community values.

With Fujitsu's TEAMware workflow and document management software as its central building block, the BOSS e-solution manages the entire "life cycle" of a classification - from the receipt and acknowledgment of requests, via the allocation of work and documentation of decisions, to the final issue of a classification certificate. BOSS is not just about passive record-keeping, but represents true e-Business infrastructure that can, according to established rules configured within TEAMware, automatically queue priority work and escalate overdue files, notifying relevant people by e-mail of approaching deadlines. It even makes use of electronic signatures to allow OFLC employees to take responsibility for work they have completed.

These same BOSS documents, excluding related confidential material such as OFLC internal memos, can be viewed from anywhere in the world by an OFLC client who has made a classification request, using secure password-controlled access from the Net.

And for the general public, another searchable sub-set of the BOSS information is published live on the Web so that parents can check the classification status of a new computer game or video stores validate the rating of an adult movie accurately and immediately. This low-cost facility supersedes an earlier manual process in which the OFLC would publish recent classification decisions on its Web site in weekly batches.

The Fujitsu solution employed an existing hardware platform, and runs on a generic Windows NT server. And the use of a Web browser interface eliminated overnight the problems of having different generations of PCs and Macintosh computers running within the agency, with all information equally visible to all OFLC users.