 |
13th
Nov 2000 |
By
Dr. R. Srinivasan,
CTO, iCMG, Bangalore |
| Vote for e-Governance
for faster service |
| e-Governance does not merely
mean integration of various applications.
The final objective is to make it viable and
meaningful for the numerous departments. |
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, available
in any place at any time - a typical illustration
of EAI. This is the aim of each of our State Governments
and also of the Central Government. EAI is viewed
with a 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 made by the government of Maharashtra,
the Chief Minister said, "The objective of Information
Technology in the 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.gopinath-munde.com)
If we closely
examine we 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. Mr. Dale Keen
of Vitriya.com adds, "Application integration
is the software equivalent of climbing Mount Everest."
Indeed it is a challenging job. He further comments,
"You can either solve it with a tactical solution
or with one that solves your
integration platform - that can grow as your integration
solutions grow". So it is clear that e-Governance
does not merely mean computerizing several individual
applications and facilitate that citizen to view
them in isolation; but rather integrating them
to give meaningful information. To quote Dale
Keen again, this task will be similar to, "a car
built using components from Ford, General Motors,
and Chrysler. The solution should provide a complete
set 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 exist
two schools of thought in this; one that votes
for the proprietary system and the other 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
that 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 of proved
to the 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
is not possible in the case of an enterprise such
as the government, where applications are not
only 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.
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