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