Conference presentation ebiv3

2nd International e-Governance ConferenceBaghdad, 2-3 December 2012

Breaking information silos: toward an Iraqi e-Service ecosystem supporting the life-event

approach

Emilio Bugli Innocenti

The Life Event Approach

Services that are directly related to the solution of a particular problem should be linked or integrated in such a way that the customers gain quick and convenient access to all the services they need in one place, regardless of the distribution of competences between different public agencies and businesses

Such approach is called a life-event approach since it integrates services, which are specifically designed around nodes that directly correspond to a particular life-event (e.g. moving a house, starting a business, getting married, etc.).


Life-event portal implementationall relevant agencies offering the same service in a common manner, sharing data definitions and at best sharing data, but no technological integration between the services being offeredservices are collected together under a common theme or event. The services are not inherently integrated, or even with a common look-and-feel, but are grouped in ways that aid discovery and promote the comprehensive completing of necessary servicesservices are delivered by a single provider as an agent of other government agencies. Singular services are offered by the agent and the integration is hidden from the ‘customer’services are technologically integrated into a supply-chain application. This requires the most sophisticated integration work and is not often implemented


A Case Study: Slovenia Life-event portal


The Slovenia Life-event portal (www.e-uprava.gov.si)Information has been classified according to life events, thus enabling users to acquire the desired information more rapidly. Each insight into specific life situations of citizens and businesses is associated with links leading to Public Administration web pages of similar content

The portal provides access to the e-SJU system (Electronic Services of Public Administration) which supports all the procedures with electronic forms (generating eForms with a special generic tool, authentication with all qualified digital certificates, partial pre-fill from Central Population Register, logical controls, support for attachments, ePayments, electronic signing, delivering to the responsible institution, electronic delivery). The application can be used by all residents equipped with qualified digital certificates valid in Slovenia.


A Case Study: Dubai Life-event portal


A Case Study: Dubai Life-event portal (www.dubai.ae)Dubai e-GOVERNANCE has collaborated with government departments and private sector organisations to create awareness about the latest innovations in e-Governance and the efficiency of the e-Services being offered by Dubai e-GOVERNANCE, where e-Services provided by more than one government department are integrated into customer focused life events.

A strong, unified base to address the needs of the public through more than 2,000 electronic services provided by various government departments in the emirate has been built. Information and services are packaged based on various life stages of individuals, businesses and visitors. This system allows portal users to have direct access to services

that they require without having to browse through several web pages

Life-Events and e-Service Integration

E-Service Taxonomy

•Process Services which represent actual workflows (macro flow), combining other (basic and/or composed) services through service orchestration in a long-running flow of activities (or services) which can be interrupted by human intervention. Process services are therefor stateful meaning that they can preserve certain state across multiple calls of the service;

•Composed Services are based on other services which are combined into a new composed service. Conceptually composed services are stateless and short-term running. They represent a micro flow comprising a short-running flow of activities (which are services) as part of a business process;


E-Service Taxonomy

•Basic Services implement basic business functionality which it does not make sense to split into multiple services. Basic services are also stateless and can be subdivided into two types:

– Basic Data Services read or write data from or to one backend system. These services typically each represent a fundamental business operation of the back-end. Basic services encapsulate platform-specific aspects and implementation details from the outside world, so that the consumer can request a service without knowing how it is implemented. These services should provide some minimal business functionality

– Basic Logic Services represent fundamental business rules. These services usually process some input data and return corresponding results


E-Service Taxonomy


Fundamental Services

•A ‘Fundamental Service’ is a Basic public service (both Basic Data and Basic Logic Services) that is autonomous and that is provided by a single responsible role, and receives as input only the output from Basic Data Services, documents or objects produced by citizens, businesses or administrations.

Life-Events and e-Service IntegrationExamples of e-Service Re-usability

Environmental Permit

•A combination of different permits (building and demolition permits, usage permits, waste permits and water permits each of them issued by municipalities in isolation) is needed to be compliant with the environmental law

•The implementation of the Environmental Permit law in municipalities demonstrates how establishing services as building blocks has helped municipalities to solve the problems related to the implementation of this law.



Life-Events and e-Service IntegrationExample of e-Service Re-usability


•The ‘intake of request’ service ensures that all the required information is collected from the permit requestor

•The ‘orchestration & follow’ up keeps track of the sequence (performance of the cases in parallel or sequence), the time limit and the consistency between the regulations of the overall permit

•This orchestration services are the ‘glue’ between the domain specific services, such as the building, water, waste and usage permits, all of which are provided by different departments


The Permit Front Office

SOA enables Cloud Computing


Cloud Computing is a deployment architecture, not an architectural approach for how to architect an enterprise/public administration.

SOA is an architectural approach that creates services that can be shared and reused. It converts current vertical applications into a number of components called services that can be reused across multiple applications, thus providing savings and improved agility to make changes faster and more cost effectively


Moving successfully into cloud computing requires an architecture that will support the new cloud capabilities. Many business leaders and analysts agree that moving to cloud requires having a solid, service oriented architecture to provide the infrastructure needed for successful cloud implementation

SOA can provide the backbone to allow both user front-end applications and enterprise back-end servers to easily access cloud services. With SOA already in place, taking advantage of cloud computing will be easier, faster and more secure.

Making SOA and Cloud Computing happen

The adoption/customisation/implementation of an Enterprise Service Bus

Making SOA and Cloud Computing happen

The ESB-based Integration Architecture

Making SOA and Cloud Computing happenCase Study: Belgium•The Belgian Federal ICT Service (FEDICT) has established the Federal Service Bus (FSB) through which services from different domains, related to different back-ends, are provided openly and are reused by different actors•FEDICT acts as a service integrator, which means that the FSB acts as a platform on which services are provided and integrated so that they can be openly accessed by parties that are interested in re-using them.•The Belgian example of the FSB provides a real-life example of how services can be reused and combined based on SOA principles. Currently a total of 53 existing services are made publicly available on the FSB, including for example applications for eBirth (electronic registration of the birth of a child by hospital personnel), the Crossroad Bank for Social Security (CBSS) and the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (CBE), the latter of which is currently being deployed within this architecture, and the eDepot.

Making SOA and Cloud Computing happenRecommendations

•In addition to technical issues, consider legal, contractual, organisational, privacy, security constraints.•Concerning the Cloud Computing privacy/security there are a number of recommendations available from the EU [8] and the US [9].•Avoid being locked-in by vendors, cloud infrastructure should be selected to allow switching from one vendor to another through the adoption of the following standards:

– Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI)– Open Virtualization Format (OVF)

•On the organisational side, the standardisation of interfaces and cloud computing can have a dramatic effect on ICT job losses as witnessed by the massive adoption of such technology by the multinational oil company ENI.

Conference presentation ebiv3

Technology

particular lifeevent

dubai lifeevent portal

customer focused life

dubai egovernance

singular services

government agencies

iraqi eservice ecosystem

electronic signing