Selected systems and infrastructure to which Harsha Wijayawardhana contributed as a system designer, architect, technical lead, project lead, consultant, Head of UCSC’s Software Development Unit or COO/CTO of Theekshana R&D.
National e-Government procurement platform for the Department of Public Finance, Ministry of Finance. The documented implementation covered Shopping, NCB and ICB procurement methodologies and later contract-management work.
Harsha led the research and development of the locally engineered AFIS for the Criminal Record Division of Sri Lanka Police. The platform created a national repository for ten-print records and supported the comparison of both complete impressions and latent fingerprint fragments recovered from crime scenes.
The work went beyond procuring a packaged product: the team evaluated the NIST open-source foundation and introduced algorithms and operational tools for fingerprint enhancement, cleaning, cropping, minutiae marking, indexing and matching. It was designed around the working practices of Sri Lankan fingerprint examiners and included the supporting interfaces required to move cases through examination and verification.
The system changed a substantially manual search process—reported as taking as long as four weeks—into a computer-assisted process capable of producing results in approximately one day. AFIS was ceremonially opened at the Deyata Kirula exhibition in February 2014 and received e-Swabhimani recognition in 2014.
View the AFIS media gallery, Manthan photographs and Indian and Sri Lankan reporting →
Harsha developed the election application and the secure intranet used by the office of the Commissioner of Elections for election operations and results dissemination. The solution linked the Commissioner’s office with seven media institutions, allowing authorised organisations to receive official results through a controlled network rather than relying on fragmented manual delivery.
The work combined application development with the design and implementation of the supporting network. It included election-results processing and publication, multilingual presentation of results and operational support for time-critical election-night activity. The project forms part of Harsha’s longer association with computerised election work under Prof. V. K. Samaranayake and the University of Colombo.
Customizable workflow and document-management technology used to capture records and issue certificate copies through divisional administration.
A multi-level approval platform deployed across Sri Lanka’s public universities for overseas-leave applications and ministerial sanction.
Designed the Business Logic Rule Engine and contributed to the specialized algorithms, rule-based database and dashboard used to computerize selection and admission to Sri Lanka’s public universities. The system operated through several versions for approximately eight years. Detailed project record →
CTO-level participation through Theekshana in implementation and maintenance of N-HEMIS, the national information system supporting planning, monitoring and evaluation across higher education. The wider programme was coordinated by Ajantha Ratnayake as EMIS Manager. N-HEMIS history and sources →
National information system documented as supporting fertilizer-subsidy cash grants to bank accounts of approximately 1.8 million farmers.
Registration, document-processing, monitoring and client-intranet applications for patent and trademark workflows, with automated reminders and management reporting.
Designed and implemented the WAN/LAN, a 2 Mbps radio-frequency link and the initial website for the pioneering UNESCO-supported rural telecentre and community-radio initiative.
Developed affordable wireless last-mile connectivity for rural telecentres and villages through the IDRC-supported project; compiled articles documenting its lessons and connectivity options.
Operational automation for Sri Lanka Police garage functions.
Rule-based selection and web management systems for higher-education programmes.
Correspondence and action-status monitoring for the Ministry of Lands’ Land Acquisition branch.
Route permits, HR and payroll, accounting, project management, inventory and networking across seven offices.
Data capture and analysis tools, secure intranet, SQL analysis and record-linkage algorithms for a human-rights consortium.
Team leadership for the Department of External Resources management information system at the Ministry of Finance.
LAN/WAN, server and website work for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government Information Department, Presidential Secretariat, Immigration and Emigration, and other institutions.
In-house ERP and ICT-department development for the American Group of Companies, followed by business-process automation work for other private-sector clients.
External technical review of the National Water Supply and Drainage Board’s enterprise-wide ICT programme, including deliverables, network designs and technology appraisal.
Training of the Tesseract OCR engine for Sinhala and development of post-processing and web-interface components.
Development of a self-installable Tamil OCR system under an ICTA/World Bank-supported programme.
Research, font development and public resources supporting standards-conformant Sinhala and Tamil digital text.
Research and development of translation technology for common use.
Founding steering-committee member · LMS and curriculum adviserHarsha was a founding member of the Steering Committee of Telecentre.org Academy Sri Lanka and served on the committee that drafted curricula for the Global Telecentre.org Academy. He advised the international programme on the selection of its e-learning technology platform and subsequently led work to host, maintain and support the learning-management environment.
The initiative supported capacity building for people operating community telecentres. The work included administrator and user training involving participants from five countries, adaptation of learning interfaces and the practical operation of an internationally accessible online learning service.
Photograph: Harsha Wijayawardhana with the University of Colombo delegation, including Vice-Chancellor Prof. Kshanika Hirimburegama, at the 2009 Telecentre.org Consortium of Universities meeting at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi.
As part of the wider UCSC, Theekshana and Telecentre.org learning portfolio, Harsha contributed to LMS initiatives involving Bhutan and other participating countries. The work covered the deployment and administration of online-learning environments, localisation and adaptation of course interfaces, technical capacity building and training for the personnel responsible for sustaining the platforms.
These projects extended Sri Lankan e-learning expertise beyond the country and connected technology selection with course delivery, institutional training and long-term operational support. Further project dates, institutional names and beneficiary figures will be added as the original completion reports are recovered.
Research and standards work that supported encoding Sinhala numerals in ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode.
The public Theekshana portfolio also records systems for university selection and registration, Finance Commission MIS, UGC check-digit and payment reconciliation, EAT-SMART and NETCODE health applications, DOME/e-PES mobile services, e-filing, digital archives, document management, 3D research models and instructional-design projects. These are presented as institutional team achievements unless a source specifically identifies Harsha’s personal role.
Documentation basis: This portfolio consolidates Harsha Wijayawardhana’s public Theekshana biography, Theekshana and SDU project records, the Bank of Ceylon 2022 Annual Report and contemporary reporting on AFIS. Dates and status descriptions reflect those source records and may not represent the present operational status of each system.