The crux of the problem in e-Governance
is to integrate various applications belonging
to the different departments within a Government
and to the different Governments in the Country
in such a way that information accessibility for
the common man is easy at any place at any time-a
typical illustration of EAI. This is the aim of
every one of our State Governments and so also
that of the Central Government. EAI is viewed
under different perspective in the Corporate wide
applications. However the methodology and implementation
in e-Governance is more or less the same. For
example, if we take the case of the efforts of
Maharashtra, the Chief Minister said, "the objective
of the Information Technology in Government will
be to improve the quality and productivity of
services rendered by the government, make the
governance transparent and bring IT to the common
man. His government has identified 17 different
applications for which software is being developed
and the associated data base being created (Ref:
www.gopinathmunde.com)
If we closely examine these applications
every one of them will need integration with some
other application(s) so that useful information
can be disseminated to the common man; of course
this integration must be transparent to the user.
Like Mr. Dale Keen of Vitriya.com says, "application
integration is the software equivalent of climbing
Mount Everest", that is this the real challenging
job. He further adds, "you can either solve it
with a tactical solution or with a strategic solution-one
s"ow as your integration solutions grow". So it
is clear that e-Governance does not end just by
computerizing several individual applications
and give facility to the citizen to view them
in isolation; but integrating them to give a meaningful
information is a must. To quote Dale Keen again,
this task will be similar to, " a car built using
components from Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler.
The solution of modular integration services"
and so it needs very good planning, namely the
appropriate applications development for various
departments and the architecture for interaction
among them. There exists two schools of thought
in this; one is to go for proprietary system and
the other is to have in house development with
the help of Software Professionals. A noteworthy
case study in this direction is that of Kerala.
Mr. Prathapan under the headline "Kerala Evolving
new Vistas in e-Governance" (Hindu/May 26,2000)
explains the Panchayat information Network, encompassing
three panchayats, where the concept of "Open Source
Code Software", developed in house, is introduced.
A cost comparison of technology
induction shows the in house development is only
10% of the proprietary software procured from
outside and the recurring cost is proved to be
zero while it will be a big amount for the proprietary
software. Whether it is proprietary one or in
house development, it is imperative that the Applications
are developed towards a specific standard so that
interaction among them is well defined and seamless.
This is where Component-Based Development" plays
a vital role. For example two applications on
the same system can communicate through COM; but
in reality this not the case to be in an enterprise
like the governments, where applications are not
only going to be written by different people for
different departments/governments but also are
going to be under different environments with
respect to hardware platform, languages and Operating
systems. We will discuss the solutions that are
prevalent to circumvent this situation in the
next article.
