Web Services: The Way to Go

The Belgian Federal Govern ment launched a Web-based e-procurement system
to re place its paper-based public acquisitions procedures. The Joint Electronic
Public Procurement project creates a "network of portals" for a
whole-of-government electronic tendering process.

The state of Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Health and Human
Services deployed a new Web-based system called MassCARES that helps caseworkers
and beneficiaries locate resources, determine program eligibility, and
coordinate the flow of information between the many agencies acting in shared
cases.

The Australian Taxation Office created the Australian Business Register, a
company registry interoperating with all federal, state, and local agencies that
serve and regulate the business community, making it easier, faster, and less
costly for business to deal with government.

By 2005, the UK government expects all its departments to offer their
services electronically. They launched a project–Government Gateway–that
helps central and local government and devolved administrations get services
online faster.

These diverse stories have two things in common:

First, they illustrate an emerging trend. Governments all over the world are
actively evolving into e-governments: tech-savvy, service-oriented organizations
with all the efficiency and flexibility of the best private enterprises. Central
to that evolution is delivering services electronically–both internally, among
departments and agencies, and externally, to businesses, citizens, and
intermediaries.

E-Government: The Challenges

Consumers take it for granted that businesses will deliver information and
services electronically, through a variety of channels, in a personalized,
secure way. As citizens, they are beginning to expect the same level of
convenience from public agencies.

E-learning in captivity: Prisoners undergoing computer training in Tihar jail

Today, however, the average citizen or business typically deals with a wide
range of separate departments and officials rather than having a single entry
point to government-provided services. For instance, a business applying for
licenses and permits to open a new location might have to deal with state and
local licensing departments, the fire department, police department, etc. The
process is daunting and inconvenient.

Not only does this "silo" approach impede and discourage citizen
interaction with government, it has high monetary costs, ranging from
inefficient use of resources to fraudulent manipulation.

To take one example, an investigation in the U.K. by the Benefit Fraud
Inspectorate (BFI) revealed that lack of coordination between the central
Government Benefits Agency (responsible for paying out Ј96 billion annually)
and the housing benefits paid out by local authorities (a further Ј13.7
billion) resulted in levels of fraud and waste amounting to some Ј840 million
per year.

As an example of how e-government might meet these needs, consider pensions.
An individual may have a mix of employer, personal, and state pension plans.
Imagine a composite Web-based pension system that; enables the individual to
move funds from one plan to another; combines the results into a single
statement; and uses the consolidated statement to model projections of
retirement income. Such a system would assist coordination among multiple
agencies, reduce the exchange of paper forms among the individual and agencies,
reduce the cost of administering the programs, and provide accurate insights
into the pension position of the population, improving governments’ ability to
make smarter policy.

The IT Challenge

The world has changed dramatically in recent years, and governments are
moving quickly to adapt. Government agencies need to make faster, more informed
decisions–communicating and collaborating immediately and effectively no
matter where employees are located. They need to better understand and serve
their customers: citizens, businesses, and other agencies. They need to
seamlessly interact with private sector partners, to encourage and support
economic development. They need to be more efficient than ever, doing more with
less. In short, they need the same business agility that characterizes
successful private sector enterprises.

One key to business agility is IT. Rather than simply a cost center or a
limitation on innovation, IT can be a strategic asset. It should enhance, not
encumber, the management of public services. It should help governments enhance
employee productivity, rationalize operations, streamline inefficiencies, and
launch new services. It should enable them to do more with less, and to increase
citizen satisfaction and participation in the process.

The move to e-government requires a coherent strategy for addressing the
current state of government IT systems.

Governments need economical, flexible IT that offers high returns on
investment and that not only meets existing challenges but creates opportunities
for new and innovative services and solutions.

Web Services

Across industries, momentum is gathering towards the use of Web services to
achieve flexible, scaleable IT systems. Five important facts about Web services:

• Web services are discrete units of software that intero—perate, based on
  industry-standard protocols, across platforms and programming languages.
• Web services are based on standard protocols (XML, SOAP, WSDL) developed
  by industry leaders, including Microsoft, and submitted to independent
  public standards organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Use
  of these standards enables interoperability.
• Web services interoperate by sending discrete messages; they do not need
  the continuous network connection that makes traditional systems vulnerable
  to network downtime.
• Web services share data and functionality; unlike the static server-client
  model that has dominated the Web, where Web pages present
  "snapshots" of data, the Web service model is dynamic. Large tasks
  can be distributed over multiple computers interacting and operating in
  tandem.
• An application that is "exposed" (made available for use) as a
  Web service can be "consumed" (used) by any application that can
  read XML, no matter what platform or device the application is running on.
  The same Web service can be used by a PC, a laptop, or a PDA–any
  "smart client"–so your developers don’t need to program new
  and separate applications for each device.

CHANGING LIVES: Govt agencies need to better understand and serve their citizens, businesses and other agencies

Web service solutions can leverage existing investments in
desktop software, directory services, and legacy enterprise systems; they can
integrate Microsoft products, IBM, Oracle, and Sun products, and agencies’
significant installed base of homegrown applications. This means governments can
save they money they would spend connecting their systems with a proprietary
solution, or through "ripping and replacing" their systems. Web
services enable government agencies to securely expose intra-agency data and
applications as "services" to communities of users–private citizens,
businesses, intermediaries, or other agencies–that could not previously access
them. For instance, the Commerce department could share census database figures
for a particular local district with that district’s urban planning board. Law
enforcement agencies could share criminal information from disparate local and
state systems to aid real-time crime analysis. Local and federal departments
from the Post Office to the Social Security Administration could share address
information so that citizens, when moving, only need update their address once.
Military units could quickly share tactical information across a range of
devices.

Web services enable an extraordinary degree of flexibility
for government IT departments. An application that is exposed as a Web service
does not need any "knowledge" of the applications that use it; it can
be consumed (used) by any other Web service—enabled application or device.
This means that services can be "loosely coupled," connected on the
fly to create composite solutions tailored to specific individual, business, or
agency needs.

An IT architecture based on Web services is uniquely suited
to help meet the five criteria for a coherent, proactive e-government program:

• Utilization of the basic infrastructure of the Internet.
  Web services are designed to operate over Internet protocols–primarily
  HTTP, but also other protocols like FTP and TCP. This means that they can
  make use of commercially available security technologies designed to protect
  Internet information sharing.

• Support of open interoperability standards (e.g., XML,
  SOAP, etc.). Web services are based on industry-standard protocols.

• A unified set of electronic security/privacy standards
  and practices. Recognizing the need to standardize capabilities that ensure
  the reliability and security of Web services, Microsoft has joined other
  industry leaders in submitting specifications for an industry-wide Web
  service security architecture.

• Provision of a unified interface into the myriad services
  offered by government, even where behind the scenes those services are
  administered separately. The interoperability architecture possible with Web
  services enables governments to "loosely couple" systems and
  applications into flexible working groups based on service-specific needs.
  Agencies can connect up their IT systems behind the scenes and offer
  citizens a single, easy-to-use interface that integrates information and
  capabilities seamlessly. Thus, the citizen receives services through single
  points of access, even though the services may still be administered by
  separate departments or agencies.

• Provision of services through a range of technical and
  business channels, such as commercial portals and access points in
  supermarkets, libraries, and other key citizen points of contact. Web
  services are functional over a wide variety of programming languages and
  platforms. An application exposed as a Web service can be consumed (used) by
  any other application capable of reading XML, no matter what platform or
  device it is running on. The same Web service can be consumed by a server, a
  personal computer, a public kiosk, or a handheld device. With Web services,
  governments can offer services to citizens or businesses at a wide range of
  contact points, based on service needs, not IT limitations.

Courtesy Microsoft

Reducing Fraud and Waste

The São Paulo Council manages more than 30 social programs that
make possible the social integration of more than 7 million citizens (in a city
of more than 10 million). The services include cash funds for people with
children in school, medical assistance, training for the integration of elderly
people into the job market, training for unemployed people, and many others.
These programs were managed by a range of computer systems with decentralized
databases. This caused duplicate information, made fraud easier (people
registered with multiple similar social programs), and prevented a global and
centralized vision of the results and needs of the city’s social programs.

For the purpose of managing the granting of benefits, São Paulo
Council’s Secretariat of Development, Labor, and Solidarity developed a
Municipal Corporate Database to store the information related to all social
actions for the assistance of the needy and socially excluded citizens. The
solution was developed in 120 days and was given the name Banco de Dados do
Cidadão (BDC, Citizen Database). This database will save the São Paulo Council
about 250 million Reals a year, thanks to faster processes and decreased fraud,
making it possible for social programs to reach more citizens.

Reducing Administration and Retargeting Resources

Curitiba, the capital of the State of Paraná in Brazil, is recognized both
locally and internationally for its innovative urban solutions. One of the
initiatives of the Curitiba Council is democratizing access to government
information. Part of this initiative was to establish an e-procurement system
for the Council. The system was prepared for the procurement operations of the
Curitiba Municipality, covering all its purchase processes, reducing paperwork,
and rationalizing work. A team was able to develop the first stage of "E-Compras
Curitiba" in about 90 days.

The project’s central effects have been to increase the speed
and agility of the procurement process and to free procurement supervisors from
paperwork overload so that they can focus on the negotiation process. This
reduces the operating expenses of the Municipality’s public procurement
process and streamlines purchase decision-making. There is less paper to be
processed, administrative costs are lower, and policy-makers are freed up to
make better decisions.

Creating Interoperable IT Systems

.NET enables e-governments to offer seamless access to services even where,
behind the scenes, a number of previously incompatible computer systems are at
work. Consider the experience of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The
ABS has accrued IT resources for more than 25 years and now has more than 250
applications running on a mix of Windows® 95, Windows NT®, Sun Solaris, Lotus
Notes, SASS, and Oracle systems. Recently, the ABS used .NET-connected Web
services to link these systems such that statistical resources can be compiled
from a variety of sources and delivered to sister agencies automatically. ABS
databases and applications, in effect, talk to each other and work together to
compile the appropriate data; nobody has to troll through systems and interfaces
one by one.

The ABS discovered that Microsoft solutions based on .NET
connectivity are cost-effective, flexible, and quick-to-market.

Encouraging Private Sector Participation

The Presidio of San Francisco, one of the oldest national landmarks and the
largest National Historic Preservation site in the United States, is co-managed
by two federal agencies: The Presidio Trust and the National Park Service (NPS).
Both the Trust and NPS share day-to-day operational responsibility–for the
park, its 2,000 private residents, 210 commercial tenants, and five million
annual visitors–with the US Park Police, Presidio Fire and Paramedic
Departments, and private industry partners and subcontractors.

As part of its overall e-government strategy, The Presidio Trust
is deploying a number of automated, Web-enabled solutions built around a new
agency portal. The Presidio Trust tied its back-end applications and data to a
variety of online functions, exposed to users as Web Services. "Web
Services integration is a key development strategy for us," says Wolf Tombe,
e-government program manager at The Presidio Trust. "We’re just very
happy that we can use online tools to enhance delivery of services and
information in practically every area that we manage–from law enforcement to
accounting to plumbing repairs."

The "Presidio One-Stop" has streamlined interactions
with private sector partners and increased private interest and participation in
the Presidio.