NEWS: Taking governments from ‘e’ to ‘i’

KUALA LUMPUR: Oracle Corp is helping the public sector — which it regards as its biggest customer — improve on the efficiency and responsiveness of its services through its iGovernment roadmap.

The Oracle vision, which was first uncovered last year during the company’s annual conference and exhibition known as Oracle OpenWorld, is a roadmap that government agencies can use to make their services and policies better and more targeted.

According to Lalit Gupta — vice-president of the public sector and education industry business unit at Oracle Asia Pacific and Japan — iGovernment is about being innovative, integrated and intelligent.

“In our iGovernment vision, public sector services are more flexible and agile, and are able to interoperate between the different sectors while undergoing constant improvements based on user feedback,” he said at a media briefing recently.

The ultimate goal of the roadmap is to transform government service delivery, he said.

Mapping it out

As the first step to attaining iGovernment nirvana, Gupta said, public sector organisations need to be modernising their IT infrastructure.

This means transforming current silo-based legacy systems into open standards and adopting service oriented architecture (SOA) to put together services that can work across sectors in the organisation, he said.

“SOA is at the heart of the iGovernment strategy,” he said. It enables organisations to take components in their legacy systems and offer these as a service which can be added to as and when the organisation sees fit.

This approach, Gupta said, will allow organisations to take advantage of new technology while still utilising the content of existing systems.

“It does not make sense to just throw away years of data and policies in a legacy system and to immediately run new technology,” he said.

The public sector organisations should also be looking to move towards grid computing and virtualisation, which can that offer high computing power at lower cost.

“This is to enable the organisations to easily assign server resources to different service applications,” he said.

A consistent security policy that runs across all sectors completes this first step in achieving the iGovernment goal, Gupta said.

“Traditionally, security is silo-based. We are proposing enterprise-wide security policies that apply to all sectors,” he added.

Efficient and transparent

Another step in the transformation is to ensure the efficiency and transparency of the services or applications offered.

This, Gupta said, can be done by using shared services across every sector in the organisation.

Normally, shared services are limited to backoffice processes but Oracle is bringing it to the front office space so that organisations can leverage investments across a larger number of users.

He said such shared services offerings will also allow organisations to streamline their business processes and enable cross-agency processes.

“This also enables organisations to deliver more innovative services,” Gupta said.

Taking steps to increase efficiency and transparency also assures the integrity of operations.

As governance, risk and compliance become a big issue, public sector agencies need to apply the correct applications that deliver real-time visibility into the risks while at the same time allow organisations to implement controls for operational integrity, said Gupta.

Once these two steps have been completed, the organisations can then focus on transforming the service delivery platform.

The ideal service delivery platform in an iGovernment environment is a common platform that combines both frontend and backend applications.

This platform facilitates the use of master data in cross-agency deals and the embedding of business intelligence and analytics systems to monitor and improve the services offered.

Mass appeal

Oracle has been pitching its iGovernment vision to many countries and it claims the vision has been well received worldwide.

It claims the roadmap gives governments a better understanding of what they need to put in place in order to improve service delivery to their citizens.

“It’s also about improving the current eGovernment offerings that many nations have already rolled out,” Gupta said.

To learn more about Oracle’s iGovernment vision, go to
http://tinyurl.com/pxcsk8.