Transaction Platforms: e-Governance Essentials

Traditionally,

applications built for government departments in India have primarily addressed

small closed groups of users within individual departments. These also fall

within specific geographies of that particular department. This is true whether

at the Regional Transport Office, the Registrar’s Office for Property and Land

Registration, the treasury department or the revenue and tax departments–sales,

excise, customs, income-tax. Applications that have been developed or deployed

have typically been restricted to a particular computer application for a ‘branch’

office. Transactions that necessitate inter-branch movement of data have been

done in a ‘batch-mode’ either by actual physical transfer of floppy disks or

magnetic tapes or through transfer of files over local or wide area networks.

Public interaction is, therefore,

still restricted to the specific office where the original transaction took

place, as this is where the data resides. Citizens still need to make multiple

visits to the specific branch where they initiated the transaction to complete

it–and of course, all during official working hours. The service levels are

also unreliable due to failures of hardware, communication links and software,

and the personnel involved.

While attempts are being made to

network these branches to each other, the applications that have been developed

are neither designed for inter-branch transactions nor are able to be scaled up

with increasing numbers of users and transactions across branches.

With different applications being

developed independently by different agencies on heterogeneous platforms and

with limited security of transactions and data, inter-departmental transactions

are more a dream than a reality.

Thus, despite attempts to

computerize operations of these offices, there is no effective gain in

productivity in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and increase in service

levels. Also, equally important, despite fairly high investments in information

technology in key departments, correct and up-to-date data is still not

available to facilitate informed governance.

The egovernance vision

We are

witnessing an era where governments in India are increasingly modeling

themselves along the lines of business corporations. The head of the government



entity is being viewed as the CEO, the official-in-charge of finance being
positioned as the CFO and so on. Interestingly, the process has evolved to a

stage where we also have a CTO with the appointments of Secretaries for

Information Technology at the State level and the new Ministry of Information

Technology at the Center.

Egovernance promises the

following vision:

• Transactions
  
  with citizens being completed online in a matter of seconds, 24 hours a day
  
  from anywhere–offices, kiosks, internet or call-centers.

• Transactional
  
  data being captured at the point of transaction and relevant data–both
  
  local and remote–being updated automatically, seamlessly and in a secure
  
  manner.

• Online
  
  transactions to be enabled across geographies–both within a government
  
  department and across departments and other enterprises.

• Applications
  
  able to be scaled in performance, catering to large numbers of users and
  
  millions of transactions, within acceptable response times.

• Access
  
  to accurate, up-to-date information to be made available to both the public
  
  and to government officials taking care of relevant security and privacy
  
  protection issues.

The promise of this vision is a

government that can and does provide efficient and effective services to its

customers–the public. More important, convenient and transparent access to

such services is expected to be made available to citizens not only at the

government offices–but also through other channels–telephones, public kiosks

and the internet. Equally important, with data from multiple locations and

departments being made available online, governance is expected to become more

informed and responsive.

The challenge from an IT

perspective

From the

perspective of information technology, a government is essentially a large

enterprise with multiple departments in a large geographical spread. Each

government department could be treated as a service organization that needs to

enable multiple users internally, within the department, across geographies and

hierarchies to transact with each other online. This would enable the department

to offer its services to other enterprises–departments within and enterprises

external to the government. The ultimate vision is that these services could

then be offered to the department’s consumers–the public.

Need for transaction platforms

Interactions

between any of these entities–officials within the department, between

departments and with the public–result in multiple transactions at various

levels.

With the government having

already made a large investment, applications have been implemented on disparate

platforms by different vendors. It is also impractical to visualize a single

monolithic application that caters to the entire requirement of the government.

One of the challenges is also to

develop this transaction capability across both existing and new applications.

With technology changing rapidly, a method is needed by which applications built

of disparate technologies could interact with each other seamlessly. Finally,

with the distributed computing environment across the geography and functional

departments, administration and maintenance of these applications in an

effective and efficient manner is a necessity.

Transaction platforms provide the

infrastructure that is essential to provide these functions for egovernance. Any

new application being developed, and which envisages a significant transactional

context, should necessarily incorporate transaction platforms to provide the

infrastructure as part of its architecture. In addition, government departments

could invest in a transaction platform to enable integration of their existing

‘branch-based applications’ to each other and to provide inter-branch

transactional capabilities–thus, extending their existing investments.

Transaction platforms would also be essential to integrate disparate

applications to each other to provide transactions between departments.

Some case studies available on

egovernance applications incorporating transaction platforms as infrastructure

are:

• Traffic
  
  control and enforcement

• Tax
  
  Processing

• Social
  
  services–employment exchanges

• Property
  
  registration

• Postal
  
  services

• International
  
  cooperative programs

• Immigration

• Customs

• Transportation
  
  and logistics

Thus, we can safely say that once

we incorporate transaction platforms in developed applications, the vision of a

government that can and does provide efficient and effective ‘services’ to

its customers–the public–would be



realized.

S Srikanth Rao