20th Nov 2000
	By Dr. R. Srinivasan, CTO, iCMG, Bangalore

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 that solves your integration platform that can grow 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 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 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.