Over the next 3 years, Azhar and his team established more than 400 NSRCs around Pakistan and abroad. "It was a huge success and we were registering up to 50,000 citizens in day during peak registration period." There was no previous history of this kind of project anywhere in this world. What makes you appreciate this fact to an even greater extent, is the fact that NADRA was working within the confines of a political bureaucracy and red tape that was simply not used to such rapid escalation of any project. The kind of technology that had been deployed may have been extremely complex in its time, but it served a basic purpose -- to build a database and archive the records for every registered citizen of Pakistan.

2003 gave way to Mobile Registration Centers and the concept was fairly similar to that of the NSRC. "We implemented the center in a high tech van that had all similar equipment. Complete interior of mobile vans was custom designed to provide similar workflow as the NSRC, with customer convenience as a first priority. 3 different sizes of mobiles vans were chosen (Hino, Mazda, Shehzore) to accommodate different number of data entry terminals." NADRA coordinated the registration requirements with local elected officials in different rural districts of Pakistan and scheduled the visits to these towns. The local officials would announce the schedule well in advance to residents of his Tehsil/District and people would make themselves available for registration at the mobile NSRC at their town.

"At the end of the day, the mobile vans would arrive back at their Base Centers and connect themselves to NADRA HQ through connectivity at Base Center to dump the registration data. By end of project, we had 150 mobile vans operational."

By the time the team was in the middle of the first few projects, it was becoming painfully apparent that they needed powerful tools to mine the data that was being archived. Azhar explains, "there were now so many different sources of data collection which was all being aggregated in one place, we needed a way to be able to retrieve the data efficiently." The team sat down and identified the solution to yet another pain area.

There was a huge need of managing every process going at NADRA for customer services and integration. "We developed an in-house CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system at NADRA and linked it to all critical systems. The CRM system, called the Customer Relationship Management Project, enabled NADRA to track every NIC application from start to finish with Call Center support. The system was also used for MIS decision-making purpose for things like progress, data quality, performance and census information for government planning."