Technology

SOA: Enabling next generation govt

By Amelia Kwok | 25 September 2008

We take a look at how the government is using Service-Oriented Architecture to reduce the cost and increase the agility of public sector IT infrastructure.

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The wars of religion are over – and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is established as a reliable technology enabling organisations to reuse existing assets and speed up application development times. With the rising complexity of enterprise IT environments the need to develop a modern architecture that is stable, resilient and comparatively simple has become apparent.

With its numerous data sources, applications and increasingly cross-agency workflows, government was always ripe for SOA’s vaunted benefits – and public sector has indeed been a hotbed of activity as it seeks to reconcile rising expectations with complex legacy systems.

“Without an SOA paradigm and vision, it would be difficult for us to imagine and describe a future state scenario for government’s IT capabilities, to meet the kind of demands, ambitions and opportunities that confront them today,” explains Trevor Smallwood, Manager of Capability Building Projects Branch, Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), the Department of Finance and Deregulation.

SOA is a programming method that allows software components to be re-used and assembled like Lego bricks. Through reuse, the development cycle is shortened as programmers do not have to code from scratch. It is the latest term for a method of designing, developing, deploying and managing web services within an organisation, and aimed at reducing application development time and costs.

“By adopting SOA, our organisation is able to focus on developing and supporting centrally managed shared services while the other agencies focus on their business application system implementation,” said an executive at Hong Kong’s Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO).

A common problem faced by government agencies is that they have many similar citizen-facing programmes. Every time a department wants something slightly different, the department builds its own version such that across the organisation, it ends up with umpteen versions of more or less the same programme.

These slight variations are what makes systems complicated and difficult to maintain. With SOA, these important programmes become business services. You end up with one single business service for a given function that gets used everywhere in your organisation. With SOA, when you need to change a business policy, you change it in one place, and because the same service is used everywhere, you have consistency throughout your organisation.

Many agencies’ top focus is integration. Information-sharing initiatives across internal agency programme boundaries, across agencies, across levels of government, and across public-private partnerships are the most beneficial advances in programme effectiveness for agencies. Along with security, application integration has been identified by public sector decisionmakers in Asia as their top priority, according to a Forrester survey.

A government agency that faces integration problems is the Korea Institute of Patent Information (KIPI), a specialised patent information service agency founded by the Korean Intellectual Property Office. KIPI provides and manages data related to intellectual property rights (IPR) in South Korea. According to Chang-Soo Kang, team manager of IT Planning & Development at KIPI, “Integration of the IPR database is an issue that KIPI needed to address since there have been complaints about the data quality and service time – unmatched data and the agency had difficulties in providing information promptly to users.”

However, these government agencies have had some of their most intractable problems solved by SOA. “Prior to the implementation of SOA, users had to wait between three to 10 days for patent information. It now only takes users one hour to access this information. Also, data transfer time between our agencies has shortened by 50 per cent,” KIPI’s Chang-Soo reveals.

“SOA has been necessary in improving the efficient use of the government’s IT asset base and its ability to respond to and support innovative policy. Also, SOA has provided improved and consistent service delivery across multiple channels and structural boundaries,” says Smallwood.

At AGIMO, SOA has also been deployed as part of the government’s masterplan: “SOA forms part of the 2006 e-government strategy and represents a very important shift in architecture concepts,” says Smallwood.

“There is a growing realisation among Asian governments that SOA can help to serve citizens better and become more efficient in the delivery of services,” says Dane Anderson, Vice President of Research for Springboard Research. He adds that SOA helps government to combat their struggle in uniting technology platforms across hundreds of departments, and enables them to share information and offer more integrated services across whole of government initiatives.

“Since government appreciates the benefit of shared IT services and the need to improve value for oney in IT, they are likely to be early adopters of the concept,” adds Tim Sheedy, analyst at research firm Forrester. “Government agencies also have the governance structures essential to major SOA implementation already in place.”

Smallwood shares that “good governance is essential. It all starts with the investment decision and it requires a soundly understood architectural context and strategic direction to inform the decision-making process.”

Nevertheless, the adoption of SOA in the government sector will still face several hurdles. Issues like control and ownership of shared services and bureaucratic opposition to process re-engineering is likely to slow down deployment of SOA in the public sector.

“Despite the focus on SOA joining up legacy systems, which work to a degree, legacy systems are themselves significant inhibitors to a whole of government SOA. It is always a challenge to get agencies to invest in services with a capability that goes beyond their immediate needs and consequently difficult to get true whole of government value out of portfolio investments,” says Smallwood. “Dealing with shared infrastructure is always a challenge. How do we provision a whole of government orchestration platform? I’m sure there will be some performance challenges too,” adds Smallwood.

“To achieve successful SOA implementation, we have to promote adoption of interoperability standards for application integration across the government. Adopting SOA principle also means that services are required to possess well-defined and highly interoperable interfaces,” says OGCIO.

Educating and training staff is also essential when attempting to incorporate SOA into an organisation. The OGCIO has helped government agencies adopt SOA in their system implementation: “We have set up theme pages on SOA in the internal portal that depicts the challenges and considerations when planning for a SOA solution for reference by IT support staff. We also arranged relevant materials to showcase the technology in a more interactive way.”

Smallwood agrees: “Policy and programme leaders in government would benefit from being alert to basic concept of SOA so that they can appreciate the opportunities it provides for policy innovation and service delivery, and the importance of using business process management disciplines.”

However, OGCIO has certainly reaped the benefits of the technology, according to the spokesman: “In our adoption of SOA for government, we have realised the benefits. SOA enables customer-centric joint-up government applications of which the services are provided by multiple departments but perceived by the public as an entity with a one-stop flow of information. It has enhanced accessibility and user-friendliness for citizens accessing government services and information.”

The birth of SOA has not been a magic bullet in solving all of government’s thorniest IT problems. But has it lived up to the hype it created? The question generated mixed responses.

“Not yet, but I think it will. We need to remember that it will also be overtaken to a degree by the next paradigms like event driven architecture, and expectantly, self adaptive architectures. I think SOA is in fact a prerequisite enabler for future architectures. Of course there will always be clever technical people who can fib these things, but not in a sustainable and truly agile way,” says Smallwood.