Breaking Information Silos Towards Iraqi E-Service Ecosystem

2nd International e-Governance Conference, Baghdad 2-3 December 2012 Pag. 1
Breaking information silos: towards an Iraqi e-Service ecosystem
supporting the life-event approach
Emilio Bugli Innocenti
Abstract
This paper analyses the current status of the e-Service implementation within the e-Governance
programmes in developing countries with a specific focus on the Life Event approach delivery of-e-Services
along with the related Service Oriented Architecture. Then, it discusses the most suited SOA engineering
methodology in order to boost e-Service re-use and integration. Finally, a combined SOA and Cloud
Computing approachis proposed in order to provide an effective/efficient implementation of Iraqi e-
Governance Action Plan along with a possible fast take-up of e-Services.
1. Background of the topic
According to Rowley (2006)[1] e-services are“…deeds, efforts or performances whose delivery is mediated
by information technology. Such e-service includes the service element of e-tailing, customer support, and
service delivery”. This definition reflects three main components- service provider, service receiver and the
channels of service delivery (i.e., technology). For example, as concerned to public e-service, public
agencies are the service provider and citizens as well as businesses are the service receiver. The channel of
service delivery is the third requirement of e-service. Internet is the main channel of e-service delivery
while other classic channels (e.g. telephone, call centre, public kiosk, mobile phone, television) are also
considered.
One crucial aspect to consider is how the provision of these services is organised and designed. According
to a 2010 National University of Singapore/Microsoft study[2],23 public administrations, the traditional
providers of public services, are “complex federated structures where individual government organizations
work in their respective silos. This often leads to fragmented business processes and duplicated systems
and technologies.” Indeed, public services support the functioning of society and can therefore be observed
across a range of policy domains: from crime and justice, education, employment and the environment, to
health and well-being, tax and motoring, pensions and retirement, and travel and transport. This is
reflected by the Silo Government scenario above, in which separate institutions monopolise their own ICT
systems.
Instead, the provision of public services should be user-oriented, taking their point-of-view: what the user
(citizens, business or even non-profit organisations) perceive in their relationships with public bureaucracy.
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.).

However, currently only few researches go beyond the evaluation of single services and assess integrated
services or life-events, and one of this is the recent study[3] across a number of EU member States.
Indeed, as the European Union governments started consolidating their web presence and sophistication
level[4], it became intuitive that the simple online offering of government departments and agencies
services would not be the most effective way of developing more transactional and interactive capacities in
an efficient and effective manner.
The notion of life events and integrative service streams based on user group segmentation have since
evolved to reflect an online perspective of government operations based less on organisational charts and
more on citizen usage and outcomes, with the Government of Singapore credited by some observers as the
first nation to re-organise itself in such a manner. Integrated Service offerings that hide, simplify or
transcend the traditional machinery of government have thus become a focus of the e-Government project
through one or more of the following four variations of what it means to integrate services:
all 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 offered;
services 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 services;
services 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 pseudo-supply-chain application. This requires the
most sophisticated integration work and is not often implemented
In parallel, new organisational and technological models for delivering services both online and via
complementing, more traditional channels are taking hold.
From the perspective of more horizontal but in reality networked governance solutions that are the
essence of service transformation and effective security strategies, two main issues need to be addressed:
how to motivate public managers to share data and, more generally, to work jointly for the public
good; and
how to understand and influence the range of barriers, technical, organisation and legal, but also
cultural, social and political, affecting cross-agency initiatives
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a software architecture that defines the use of services, to support
software user requirements. Web services are the most promising technology to support the integration of
applications and systems of different levels of e-Governance aimed at both public individuals and private
businesses. Characteristics of these services such as reusability of business components and loosely
coupled building blocks of SOA to provide services to either end-user applications or other services through
heterogeneous networks makes SOA the best architecture match for e-Governance integration.
Implementation of SOA application is made possible through the realization of web services. With
thoughtful engineering and an enterprise point of view, SOA offers positive benefits such as language
neutral integration, component re-use, organisational agility, leveraging existing systems.
We believe that government agencies need to implement SOA, as it is the best possible architectural design
pattern suitable for integrating their e-services.

2. Current status regional and globally
Let us consider the following examples of Life Event approaches:
1. Example of Life-Event Driven Development: Slovenia
The e-Government portal e-Uprava was launched in March 2001, re-launched in December 2003 and
modernised in May 2006. The enhanced portal supports Government to Citizen (G2C), Government to
Business (G2B) and Government to Government (G2G) interactions and offers various services to citizens,
legal entities and public employees.
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.
In addition, users of e-Uprava are offered the possibility to customise the portal, i.e. adjust certain contents
to their specific needs and subscribe to individual contents.
Figure 1 – The Slovenian e-Uprava Portal

2. Example of Life-event Driven Development: Dubai
Dubai e-Government has enhanced its web portal www.dubai.ae as part of a continuing effort to reinforce
its status as a global pioneer in e-Government. The enhancement also seeks to consolidate the information
platform and build 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. The restructuring process
of the portal involved adopting a new approach called "life-events" where 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.
In this regard, Dubai e-Government 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-Government, where e-Services provided by more than one government
department are integrated into customer focused life events, bringing Dubai e-Government closer to a
virtual government.
Figure 2: The Dubai e-Government Portal
From the analysis and examples above, we understand that
a life-event includes all public services which are related to a specific situation that citizens and
businesses face (e.g., important stages in a citizen's life, such as school, marriage, or buying a
property)
'Life events‘ package government services which are usually provided by multiple government
agencies around a subject that makes sense to the citizen.
The IT systems of the participating government agencies then co-operate (i.e. interoperate) for the
seamless delivery of the e-service

3. Critical issues that need to be address in general and in the Iraqi context
In section 2, we have seen how generic customer enquiries are formulated around a concept called “Life-
Event” that is a metaphor described in literature as the representation of a basic customer service request
such as applying for passport or tax return, it requires bundling a number of available e-Governance and
possibly private e-Commerce services in order to deliver information and services to customer as packages
built around a specific life-events.
The most important aspect in creating a framework for e-Service re-use and composition is to address the
highest exploitable level of granularity of the e-Services, i. e. the e-Service building blocks something called
herein after the “Fundamental e-Services”.
According to[3], the following e-Service Taxonomy can be identified:
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 therefore 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
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
Therefore he most important aspect to promote e-Service re-use and integration is to identify the
Fundamental Services, i.e., 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.
Case Study: the Environmental Permit(The Netherlands)
In many countries, 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.

Figure 3: the Fundamental e-Service for the Environmental Permit
As depicted in the picture3,
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
It is possible to envisage a scenario in which a company - a ‘Front office’ - is established to provide a
consumer with all of the licences and permits necessary to undertake a particular activity. By reusing and
combining existing public services, it is able to request and receive licences and permits from different
public administrations, according to the end-users’ circumstances, thus providing an new service and a new
business model, based on a ‘cloud of public services.’ Through this service, a third party could handle the
request (and even granting) of licences and can therefore:
Communicate directly with all institutions involved for all licences
Group and follow up on all requests in a single place
Handle the transport of physical documents
Follow up on the expiry and renewal of licenses
Keep track of legislation that influences the licence

Figure 4: The Future: the establishment of a Front Office for Permits and Licences
4. Policy and programme implications
The methodologies and technical solutions presented in this paper have only the scope to suggest the most
effective and efficient implementation of current Iraqi e-Governance Strategies and Action Plan and
possibly guarantee a fast take up of e-Services.
5. Moving Forward: the Service Oriented Architecture as the enabler of Cloud Computing
The advent of the Cloud Computing can be considered part of the “comodisation” of the IT, being the main
driver the need to save costs and reduce IT budgets.
As such, Cloud computing has already attracted a number of developing countries[5] (e.g., from Asia, Africa
and Middle East) while developing their e-Governance programme, or sectorial initiative such as e-
Education or e-Health. The main drivers are the reduced cost of implementation and maintenance and
limited number of needed experts (if compared with other solutions).
Figure 5: The Cloud Computing Stack [6]
Basically, Cloud computing is a deployment architecture, not an architectural approach for how to architect
an enterprise/public administration.
Instead, 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

Within e-Governance programmes to support broader and more consistent integration of systems is
fundamental. System integration and data exchange activities will have to get more streamlined and
efficient across a portfolio of disparate systems. SOA inspired componentization efforts, where software
leverages other network based software using standards-based interfaces, are a response to this pressure.
Similarly, considering platform and storage services as a scalable commodity will push organizations to use
these less expensive service offerings, since the trend toward SOA and cloud computing has many of the
same drivers, such as cost reduction.
The cloud environment provides potential advantages both within a public administration, for example
using a private cloud to deliver mission-critical services and outside a public administration, using a
commercial cloud to provide new functionality and agility quickly, for example using hosted business
process management (BPM) tools and/or host less critical services. Cloud can provide advantages in self-
service, scalability, flexibility, pay-as-you-go, and improved time-to-value.
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.
The immediate benefit of combining SOA and Cloud Computing is time. Reaching out to the cloud for
business or technology capabilities allows SOA initiatives to compress time to value. In the longer term, the
benefits include improved collaboration, customer satisfaction and fewer costs. By offering SOA-based
capabilities to the cloud, a public administration can improve interactions with other administrations and
offer added-value, life event based e-Services to the citizens.
6. A path for the making of SOA and Cloud Computing
For the advent of the e-Governance Service Oriented Architecture, the concept of an Enterprise Service
Bus, i. e., a message-based distributed integration software platform, is fundamental. ESB is open-
standard,platform-independent and vendor-neutral. It can run on any operating system and hardware
structure, and can beimplemented with different technologies (e.g. J2EE, Microsoft .NET). With many
service containers distributed anddecentralised on the Internet, ESB creates a virtual service bus for system
and service integration.
With administration tools, users can configure ESB containers without requiring shutdown or interrupting
the integratedservices. ESB adopts SOA and highly enhances the SOA implementation and functionalities by
replacing the centralregistry with the bus architecture. It makes the system and service integration a truly
plug-and-play process. In themarket, major ESB vendors include IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Progress Software,
Software AG, RedHat (Open Source) and MuleSoft (Open Source).
Government experiences with ESB implementation may vary a lot from those who adopted/customised
licensed solutions (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Belgium), those who adopted/customised Open Source
solutions (e.g., Belgium, Hungary) and those who finally implemented their own Government Service Bus
(e.g., Estonia, Italy).
It is worth mentioning that with currently available ESB solutions, integrating cloud computing with other
systems can be fully realised.
It is likely that Government will gradually adoptcloud computing and will need a powerful tool to integrate
their on-premise systems to clouds for the short term. For thelong term, they need a fully integrated
infrastructure of cloud-to-cloud after their business processes are completely onclouds.Without a

comprehensive system integration architecture or tools, cloud computing will not bewidely adopted, nor
will it become a fundamental business infrastructure [7].
Figure 6: The Architecture of the Enterprise Service Bus [7]
Figure 7: The ESB-based Integration Architecture [7]
6. Implementation considerations
The implementation of an e-Governance Strategy based on SOA and Cloud Computing usually implies the
adoption of one or more of the following steps:
build one or more national/regional data centres

recruit/train technical staff for national data centres
purchase hw but also considering re-use if this is not too obsolete
purchase virtualisation sw
purchase ESB
allocate/train national/local technical staff for ESB and SOA
centralise SOA guidelines ( e-GIF)
national registers reside or have a roadmap to national cloud and available through e-services
all other mission-critical service reside or have a roadmap to central national cloud
e.g., tax services
non mission critical service can stay on private cloud, e.g.medical appointments, e-form for
students can use google
local life event e-Service to be built using ESB and access thecentral national cloud when needed
A good case study of deployment of SOA-ESB and Cloud Computing at federal and provincial level is
Belgium [4].The Belgian Federal ICT Service (FEDICT) has established theFederal 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 thatthey 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 andcombined based on SOA principles. Currently a total of 53 existing services are made publicly
available on the FSB, including for exampleapplications for eBirth (electronic registration of the birth of a
child by hospital personnel), theCrossroad Bank for Social Security (CBSS) and the Crossroads Bank for
Enterprises (CBE), the latterof which is currently being deployed within this architecture, and the eDepot.
Naturally, a government before entering the SOA-ESB and Cloud Computing implementation have a
number of issues to be considered beyond the pure technical horizon: 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].
In particular, in order to 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.
7. References
[1]J. Rowley “An analysis of the e-service literature: towards a research agenda” Internet Research, 16 (3),
2006
[2]Saha, P. “Enterprise Architecture as Platform for Connected Government: Understanding the Impact of
Enterprise Architecture on Connected Government – A Qualitative Analysis”, National University of
Singapore/Microsoft, 2010
*3+ Wauters & alii “Study on the cloud and service oriented architectures for e-Government”, Deloitte, 2011
[4] Cap Gemini. “Digitizing Public Services in Europe: Putting ambition into action”, 2010
*5+ N. Kshetri “Cloud Computing in Developing Economies”, IEEE Computer, 2010

[6+ G. Raines “Cloud Computing and SOA”, MITRE, 2009
*7+ L. Chen “Integrating Cloud Computing Services Using Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)”, Business and
Management Research, 2012
[8] [ENISASR11] Security and Resilience in governmental cloud, ENISA,
http://www.enisa.europa.eu/act/rm/emerging-and-future-risk/deliverables/security-and-resilience-in-
governmental-clouds, 2011
[9]NIST documentation, NIST, http://collaborate.nist.gov/twiki-cloud
computing/bin/view/CloudComputing/Documents, 2011

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