By Lalit Gupta

Over the last 5-10 years, governments around the world have implemented ‘e-Government’ in some form or fashion, with mixed results. Generally, such efforts have helped them provide enhanced access to information for government agencies, govt employees and citizens.

However, significant issues remain. Most government agencies today, still operate in silos, based on previously built ‘legacy systems’. Essentially, separate computing entities and environments were created to meet diverse needs, with different applications for different organizations. So, while access to services are good, the issues of legacy and IP creation based on business rules have tended to hamper growth and offering of more innovative and effective services for the citizenry. These systems are also generally inflexible and expensive to maintain.

But since they incorporate years of government policy and thousands of man hours of effort, it is understandably difficult to do away with them or move to a new, lower-cost and more agile computing environment.

This infrastructure situation is juxtaposed with an increasingly sophisticated and demanding citizenry. Citizens, both individuals and businesses, are looking for a high level of flexibility and agility by the public agencies to help them do things better and more efficiently. They are very used to particular levels of quality and convenience, drawing these expectations from the private sector. They are consequently growing more demanding in similar levels of convenience and service from their Government agencies. 

These are the two essential challenges that require a next level of evolution for the electronically-enabled government of the future. The call is for government agencies to be creative, do things differently, and quickly, across multiple agencies. Oracle defines this next step as ‘iGovernment’ – the next level of evolution for governments to address contemporary and future challenges.

iGovernment is not just about addressing inefficiencies in cost and flexibility. It is also about liberating a whole lot of energy that can be utilized to create more efficient and innovative citizen services. iGovernment will enable government services to essentially:

• be Innovative – with the flexibility and agility to do things differently and to do things better in being able to define, develop and launch innovative citizen services;
• be Integrated – to break down infrastructures and process silos to enable effective collaboration across agencies; and
• be Intelligent – to embed rich analytics capability and business intelligence into ones’ operations so that an organization is able to monitor the performance of agencies and public programs/ policies in a way not possible before.

The iGovernment net result? Government operations that arecapable of delivering more targeted public policies, with the ability to craft more creative public programs, to monitor their performance, to evaluate their impact faster, to correct as required, and to deliver new services quickly - in a nutshell, government operations that are innovative, integrated and intelligent,

Executing this iGovernment strategy will differ from market by market. However, broadly, the transition will involve three key components:  modernize the IT infrastructure, increase efficiency and transparency, and from there, transform government service delivery. All the proposed strategies, technologies and solutions that drive the transition to iGovernment are available today.   

1)     Modernize the IT Infrastructure. This is essentially about transforming legacy applications into a lower cost infrastructure that is based on open standards. Crucially, this approach must allow an organization to take an ‘evolutionary approach’ to this modernization effort. It must allow organizations to easily plug pieces of infrastructure together – as though they were puzzle pieces – as well as add and upgrade pieces as and when needed. This is the thinking behind a ‘Service Oriented Architecture’ that is fundamental to the entire iGovernment concept. This must enable an organization to take advantage of new technologies while preserving the business content of existing applications, and in the process leveraging existing investments in technology while increasing the life span of one’s legacy applications.

At the technology level, this is about a transition to grid computing and virtualization. Grid computing and virtualization provide high performance and reliability at a low cost by clustering servers together to act a single large computer, dynamically shifting server resources between applications on demand. Capacity can be added as needed – one inexpensive server at a time – providing superior scalability and a faster return on investment. Security policies can also be implemented consistently and efficiently on an enterprise basis for effective controlled access. A organization can now implement processes that connect securely between government agencies, and with users inside and outside government.

Therefore modernization of IT infrastructure is about combining open standards with Service Oriented Architecture to create a next-generation IT infrastructure that ensures security and controlled access.

2)     Increase efficiency and transparency. A modernized IT infrastructure provides the foundation for this second component, which basically concerns the breaking down of information silos, in order to enable three areas of benefit – delivering shared services, streamlining business processes, and delivering effective governance, risk & compliance (GRC) controls.

Shared services have traditionally been focused on back office functions like payroll or HR, but now even front office functions like call centers and CRM systems must also be capable of being implemented as shared services, to enable technology investments to be leveraged to serve more users and also facilitate collaboration across agencies to offer more innovative services.

A modernized, open standards based infrastructure must also enable effective streamlining of business processes - such as Planning and Budgeting, Tax & Revenue, Financial Management, HR Management, Procurement, or Project & Grant Management.

Finally, it is about assuring the integrity of operations. Consider that delivering shared services and streamlining business processes also creates the platform for implementing enterprise-wide Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) Controls.

Legacy systems cannot achieve these benefits because these require system agility and information granularity to deliver.

As an example, Oracle delivers a comprehensive application suite for GRC that provides real time visibility into risks, along with controls to ensure operational integrity. By automating the segregation of duties rules and managing access rights in a central location to prevent conflicts and deter fraudulent conduct, security of information is greatly enhanced. Running on a service oriented architecture based on open standards, the GRC solution platform works across applications and systems environments - be they Oracle apps, or other apps, including custom built ones. This allows an organization’s finance, IT, audit, or HR professionals to more effectively collaborate in developing a coordinated response to compliance risks.

3)     Transform Government Service Delivery. This is the most important component because the whole purpose of the government is to serve its citizens, businesses and other agencies!

With a modern IT infrastructure and efficient, transparent back office operations in place, the ultimate goal of transforming service delivery essentially means providing a Common Service Delivery Platform that must allow the organization to seamlessly link its CRM and case management applications with back office functions, or other services like workflow, content Management and geospatial data.

This is about delivering an enterprise wide citizen service delivery platform to deliver these benefits:

Facilitate the use of master data to deliver a cross agency view where this is relevant or useful, instead of just within departments or organizations. For example, your health history/ records across various hospitals/ health ministry.

Facilitate superior and relevant self service capabilities for relevant public users (and the organization’s staff, of course).

Facilitate embedded business intelligence and analytics to measure performance and increase accountability for the services that the organization provides. To be able to monitor the performance of the citizen service, understand the impact and accordingly tweak, modify and re-launch the service.
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It provides for what public sector organizations are not able to do today or are able to do, in a very limited fashion. Fundamental to these desirable outcomes is the need to integrate business intelligence and performance management capabilities effectively.

iGovernment – Vision and Platform

iGovernment is a long-term vision and a strategy for tomorrow. It is the platform for next level of evolution for governments.  It addresses both basic issues relating to interoperability and collaboration across agencies, AND provides for the ability to deliver more targeted public programs that are innovative and fundamentally business intelligence driven.

With a strong iGovernment-informed strategy, public sector organizations can be capable of delivering more targeted public policies, have the ability to create more innovative public programs, be able to monitor their performance, evaluate their impact faster, correct as required and deliver new services quickly. Ultimately, iGovernment can mean more value, choice and flexibility, with a lot less complexity, risk and cost.

About the author.

Lalit Gupta, is Vice President, Public Sector and Education Industry Business Unit, Oracle Corporation, Asia Pacific and Japan