Title: EGovernment Architecture in Ireland: The ServiceOriented Approach of the Public Services Broker
1- E-Government Architecture in Ireland The
Service-Oriented Approach of the Public Services
Broker
Fergal Murray VP North America,
Propylon fergal.murray_at_propylon.com
2Agenda
- Reach and Public Services Broker Background
- The Pilot Inter-Agency Messaging System
- Public Services Broker Architecture
- Technical and Business Takeaways
- Shameless
3Reach
- Governance Structures
- Cabinet Committee (chaired by PM)
- Secretary General Group (permanent heads of
Depts.) - Assistant Secretary Group (CIOs)
- Reach Board (DSFA, Prime Minister, Finance)
- Governance Instruments
- Primary Legislation Secondary Regulation
- Government Decisions
- Government (Prime Minister /Finance) Circulars
- Funding decisions (Information Society Fund
Annual Estimates) - Name Shame at Central Groups
4Public Services Broker
- An integrated set of technologies and processes
to - Provide a single point of access to all
government services - Enable agencies to share data in a standardized
way - Enable agencies to expose processes to other
agencies - Provide a core set of shared services (including
identity, authentication, case management and
payments) - Provide multi-channel access portal, walk-in
and phone - Drivers of the architectural model
- Deliver better customer service across many
channels - Efficiency economy of deployment and operation
- Speed of deployment
- Maximising possibilities for future service and
business process integration - Enable long-term (50 years) architectural
stability - Minimize overall system downtime
5Broker Channels Services
- Public Facing Channels
- Self-service over Internet (Phase 1)
- Walk-in office (Phase 2)
- Telephone (Phase 2)
- Reach-Hosted Core Services
- Identity Management Services (Identification
Authentication) - Security and Certification
- Data Transformation Services
- Portal Services
- Transaction and Case Management
- Payment Services
- Inter-Agency Messaging
- Integration Framework
- Forms Services
- Audit and Logging
6Integration of Services
- Integration Across Services and Agencies
- Enquiries and transactions from citizens and
business - Grouping of services around life episodes
- Request can initiate processes across many
agencies (e.g a Work Permit may require workflows
in Revenue, Justice, Employment and Foreign
Affairs) - Integration Across Time
- On-line data available for repeat transactions
- Integration across channels
- Same functionality available for web, walk-in or
phone customers - Ability to use different channels during a single
transaction
7Its Not a Portal
- The PSB is not a Portal
- It is a Huge Integration
- Problem Between Agencies
- (with a portal connected to it)
8Challenges
- Agencies are Highly Autonomous
- Long established entities with organizational,
legal and cultural boundaries - Different levels of technological sophistication
and capability - Different deployed platforms (paper, mainframe,
PC, J2EE, .NET) - Different data standards and models
- Lack of Agency ROI for Hosting/Exposing Services
- How to motivate one agency to offer a service
that delivers savings only in other agencies? - Data Protection and Privacy Concerns
- Danger of Technology Lock-In in creating One
True Standard - No Existing Interoperability Framework
9IAMS The Pilot
- The Pilot
- The Inter-Agency Messaging Service
- (IAMS)
10IAMS in Mid 2003
The Principal elements of the IAMS
- Elements of the IAMS
- Reliable messaging hub
- Set of transport channels
- Agreed XML message envelope
- Common set of standards
- Core functions
- Validation - Transformation - Audit -
Logging - Routing - Distribution - Security
11REACH/IAMS Envelope
- XML envelope to wrap all IAMS messages
- Envelope provides
- Message routing information
- Message audit information
- Authentication information and validation
- Message error details
- Adopted for use in PSB
12IAMS in Mid 2003
13IAMS in Mid 2003
Then there were 3!
14Inter Agency Workflow
Results PPSN (SSN) numbers issued automatically
and securely for newborns Waiting time for Child
Benefit reduced from around 6 weeks to 2
days Processing costs dramatically reduced and
manual errors eliminated
15IAMS in Feb2004
DSFA
GRO
Publish Subscribe A Killer App
IAMS
Public Pension Payment Agencies
Central Statistics Office
General Medical Service Health Boards
16Current
Life Event
Exchange of Customs
Registrars
Documents
DSFA
Customs
Agriculture
GRO
IAMS
Land
Registry
HealthBoards
CRO
Pensions
Statistics
Legal
Life Event
Agents
Land Title and
Consumers
Conveyancing
Existing Services
Services in Development
17IAMS Benefits
- Better customer service and staff savings by DSFA
(online birth notifications) - Early termination of pension and medical payments
(online death notifications) - Automated collection of life event and disease
statistics (CSO NCRB) - Savings on single parent payments (early
notification of marriages DSFA) - Secure establishment of identity of newborns
18IAMS Lessons
- Proof of Architecture
- Hard to convince first entrants of value of Hub
(stick carrot) - Best to work incrementally on live examples
- Build up examples of benefits
- The lower the technology barriers to entry, the
faster agencies will participate - Its not just about putting forms online its
much better to make the need for the forms
disappear
19PSB Architecture
20Systems Integration
Fantasy
Reality
21PSB High Level Architecture
22Observations
- Observations
- eGovernment does not happen at the front-end it
happens at the back-end. - Portals are the front window and relatively
easy to set up. - Integrating back-end systems, so that you can
deliver really valuable services via the portal,
is the hard part. - Need to insulate the back-end from the volatility
of front-end technology - Need to have a clear roadmap to evolve from
human-to-machine to machine-to-machine
integration.
23SOA Concepts
- The key idea is business data flowing between
services - Services are discrete units of functionality that
connect to other services by sending them
business-level documents in an XML format defined
and owned by Reach. - The Portal is just another service its job is
to allow service fulfillment requests to be
captured from humans. - Minimize coupling between component pieces
- All data exchange is document-centric
- All data exchange is asynchronous temporal
decoupling and stateless (the lesson of the Web!)
24The Edge Principle
RPC
Service
Routing
Service
Message Queue
Orchestration
Host
Service
Service
In/Out queue for
messaging service
MQ Series
Transformation
Service
Service
Case
Management
Service
25SOA Concepts
- Asynchronicity
- Allows you to mix and match automated and
non-automated tasks into cohesive business
processes - Facilitates evolve-ability via interventionist
brokering - Facilitates spontaneous integration
- Synchronous on top of asynchronous where required
- Minimizes technology creep across agency
boundaries
26Data Transformation
Integration via Data Transformation is
significantly faster and cheaper than integration
via APIs That bears repeating Integration via
Data Transformation is significantly faster and
cheaper than integration via APIs Transformation
happens outside back-end systems Eliminates
cascading reengineering when one system
changes Transformation is a Reality Based
Approach End-to-end consensus on data formats is
really, really hard to achieve (timemoneycomplex
ity) Transform to and from interchange formats at
semantic boundaries
Transformation Service
Service B
Service A
Service D
Service C
27Federated Ownership
System F
System E
Transformation
System A
System G
System J
Transformation
System D
System C
System H
System K
28Auditing and Monitoring
- All message exchanges are automatically logged at
every stage in the routing, from source to
destination - Complete non-repudiation and audit-trail
- Ability to monitor (like a logistics network)
- Business-level monitoring enables business
process benchmarking - Composite applications auditing the Who, What
and When of events - Granular monitoring to identify process
bottlenecks - Ability to audit later any way you want
29Security and Privacy
- Multiple overlapping, preventative, detective and
reactive security measures People, Process and
Technology - Network, Queue, Service, Routing Level Security
- Challenges with identity, delegated access and
process-to-process - Dependence on contracts (SLAs) and strong
auditability - Privacy and data protection
- Citizens own their own data
- Use transformations to prevent systematic breach
- Transparency facilitates detection of abuse
30Technology Takeaways
- This approach is better, faster and cheaper than
other distributed computing architectures very
RESTian. - Puts business flexibility/evolve-ability and
business ownership first, relegating technology
to a supporting role - Coherent, stable long-term architecture
- Scalable technically and financially
- Transparency allows sophisticated monitoring and
auditing in real-time, and of historical data - This architecture can be deployed now, without
waiting for more technology standards. All the
pieces required are well established (XML Web
reliable messaging)
31The Standard Objections
- It wont be fast enough
- Stateless massive parallelism the google
model - It will not scale
- It scales much better than most distributed
technologies see CORBA, DCOM for examples. See
the Web for a counter example! - It is not proven
- XML since 1986
- Reliable messaging since early 90s
- The web since 1991
32More Standard Objections
- We need synchronous connectivity
- Supported via sync-over-asynch. Time honored
approach (IBM SNA!) - It will be hard to manage
- Management of logistics systems a well
established discipline - We have standardized on XYZ technology
- This architecture does not require a rip and
replace - Who owns the data and the business processes? You
or the technology they are built on?
33Business Takeaways
- Building a portal is easy integrating data and
processes across agencies to be able to deliver
full services electronically is the hard part. - Business people get this architecture. They can,
and should, dictate to their technologists to
build systems the way business people think about
them. - The lower the technology barriers to entry, the
faster agencies will participate in an
integration hub. - The business value of spontaneous integration
34Business Takeaways
- Building a truly open and interoperable
infrastructure goes against the traditional
business models of software companies and system
integrators. - By keeping everything except your own data
standards out of the core of the architecture,
you get true freedom to evolve and true vendor
independence. - The fact that the architecture is designed to
spread incrementally and organically is a
powerful strategic deployment weapon.
35Find out More
- Propylon Whitepapers at www.propylon.com
- Reach Interoperability Guidelines and SDEC online
at sdec.reach.ie - Propylons PropelXsoi is a framework,
methodology and enterprise application to deploy
this architecture. Data sheets and case studies
at www.propylon.com