EGovernment Architecture in Ireland: The ServiceOriented Approach of the Public Services Broker

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• 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
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Agenda

• Reach and Public Services Broker Background
• The Pilot Inter-Agency Messaging System
• Public Services Broker Architecture
• Technical and Business Takeaways
• Shameless

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Reach

• 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

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Public 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

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Broker 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

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Integration 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

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Its Not a Portal

• The PSB is not a Portal
• It is a Huge Integration
• Problem Between Agencies
• (with a portal connected to it)

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Challenges

• 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

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IAMS The Pilot

• The Pilot
• The Inter-Agency Messaging Service
• (IAMS)

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IAMS 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
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REACH/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

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IAMS in Mid 2003
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IAMS in Mid 2003
Then there were 3!
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Inter 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
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IAMS in Feb2004
DSFA
GRO
Publish Subscribe A Killer App
IAMS
Public Pension Payment Agencies
Central Statistics Office
General Medical Service Health Boards
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Current
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
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IAMS 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

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IAMS 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

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PSB Architecture

• PSB Architecture

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Systems Integration
Fantasy
Reality
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PSB High Level Architecture
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Observations

• 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.

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SOA 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!)

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The 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
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SOA 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

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Data 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
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Federated Ownership
System F
System E
Transformation
System A
System G
System J
Transformation
System D
System C
System H
System K
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Auditing 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

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Security 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

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Technology 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)

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The 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

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More 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?

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Business 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

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Business 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.

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Find 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