OSRIN.net

The technology world is one of many buzzwords and phrases, one that you hear a lot at the moment is “Service Oriented Architecture” or “SOA” which sounds like a highly technical methodology for systems design, in reality SOA techniques can provide a very effective way of dealing with organizational complexity and divides as we work towards delivering cross departmental government services over the web.

During the final months of 1995 I found myself involved for the first time in an eGovernment project. The goal of the project was a simple one, we were tasked with providing a single “Smart Form” that would allow an individual to register as being self employed. Delivering this involved working with business processes in three government agencies, two involved in taxation and one involved in employment registration.

We looked at the challenge ahead as technologies and developers and decided that this would not be a complex system to design or build. After all, it was just a single form, digitising a single well defined process…

About two weeks into the systems analysis phase of the project the enormity of the challenge ahead started to become clearer. Simple data like a name or an address was not stored in the same way across the three agencies. The processes that we were concatenating into our single form were all being run with different service level agreements and delivering on each agreement was quite rightly something that was taken very seriously by the owners of each service. Finally it was also clear that the small amounts of addition overhead of work that would be need to run our single service just didn’t belong in any of the three agencies, and in turn didn’t have any manpower or budget in place to run it.

As a technology company the project soon began to look more like a nightmare than an opportunity, of course for the government we were working with these were exactly the types of lessons that they wanted to learn as they planned for a broader set of projects across the wider civil service.

It is interesting to look back on projects like that today and consider what has changed in the world of technology and how we might approach the project differently in today’s world. The simple answer is that these are exactly the types of challenges that information technology and large systems design principals now take in their stride.

The industry today talks a great deal about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) which is a technical term for breaking systems into their constituent parts, and then publishing them so they can be used elsewhere while having minimal impact on the organization that provides the service.

In a Government context the advantages are clear. In a SOA world it is no longer critical that data needs to be managed in exactly the same way in every department, or that business processes need to be redesigned with the workings of the rest of the government in mind.

Today every government department can look at the services that it offers, be it licence issuance, tax collection or any other process, and then use simple web service technology to enable those services to be used by other departments or external commercial providers seamlessly.

The benefits are easy to see. Services are less complex and less costly to design and provide. With the right planning around national level architecture and data management, cross government services can be built without the need for costly and complex systems integration projects.

In some cases an agency who makes their particular line of business application available as a web service will find it being used in useful new ways by other government departments or by commercial organizations to provide services to citizens and businesses in ways that had not previously been thought about or funded.

My former team in Redmond put a lot of time and effort into looking at the right high level framework for this sort of environment would look like, the resulting work was called the “Connected Government Framework” or CGF for short. Today you will find the basic framework that the team delivered integrated tightly into many of the solutions and service offerings from Microsoft and our partners.

The lessons from this complex fifteen year journey help us deal with some of tougher issues that just about every government is facing today as they put their own plans in place for the delivery of online and electronic services. Not least of which are the still those same issues of shared service level agreements and data harmonization. Service Oriented Architectures and the technologies involved assist us in delivering complex business systems without the need to closely couple organizations or data in ways that may otherwise be less natural.

23/1/08 additional: Government Computer News this morning carries information on the release of Microsoft’s Citizen Service Platform, an announcement that was made at the Government Leader’s Forum in Berlin yesterday. Follow this link to read more;

Microsoft’s Citizen Service Platform incorporates the company’s work with local and regional governments over the past several years, and consists of templates designed to run in Microsoft operating environments for the most commonly deployed e-government services.

Microsoft will offer the initial set of online services to governments for customization and integration into their current environment later this year.