An Approach to Offering One-Stop e-Government Services - Available Technologies and Architectural Issues

The right of citizens to high-quality e-Government services makes one-stop service offerings an essential feature for e-Government. Offering onestop services presents many operational implications; an one-stop service provision (OSP) architecture is needed that, by means of a layered approach, provides facilities to refer to, invoke and combine e-Government services in a uniform way, in the context of cross-organisational workflows. Although enabling technologies for all the layers of such an architecture are quickly evolving (XML, WSDL, UDDI, WFMS et al) two major issues that need to be solved are (a) abstracting the heterogeneity of the e-Government services that need to be integrated and (b) identifying an appropriate style for cross-organisational workflow control, somewhere in between the fully centralised and peer-to-peer extremes. This paper presents an abstract layered OSP architecture, identifies some major enabling technologies and briefly discusses those two issues. 1 Some Requirements for One-Stop e-Government The delivery of e-Government services poses certain requirements inherent in the mission of government itself, that differentiate e-Government from other e-service application domains such as e-Business; customers have on option to choose the services of a specific business, whereas citizens have a right to enjoy the services of their own government. Therefore, e-Government service delivery must achieve (a) maximal benefits (quality and performance of the service, added value of the content), (b) maximal accessibility (simplicity of front-end logic, multi-linguality of user interfaces, anywhere/anytime availability, provision of alternative channels, no demands for end-user IT skills) and (c) minimal costs (transportation, communication, document management); see, e.g. [1], [6], [10], [12], [15]. The idea of one-stop e-Government presents substantial promise for contributing to all those optimality goals, whereas at the same time it is a natural fit to the concept of web portals that by definition can bring together any number of arbitrarily heterogeneous web resources. It is well established, however, that the mere collection of links to e-Government sites is a very superficial implementation of the one-stop concept; An Approach to Offering One-Stop e-Government Services 265 true one-stop e-Government calls for compilation, presentation and delivery of eGovernment services in an one-stop fashion. This means that (a) on a conceptual level, services need to be compiled into some sort of service bundles around single real-world situations where they apply; these service bundles then must be (b) logically presented at the user interface level as responses to single real-world problems (the life-event approach) and (c) actually enacted and delivered at the operational level as if they were individual (in contrast to bundled), atomic services. 2 Operational Implications of One-Stop Service Offerings Conceptual compilation of e-Government services in bundles corresponding to realworld situations must face problems like (a) how to categorize services by means of "ontological indexes" on their content (service ontologies), (b) how to refer to services (service naming schemes) and (c) how to store invocation pointers to service implementations (service repositories). The issue of actually enacting and delivering these bundles as virtually atomic services sets outs some further requirements of its own. To achieve this sort of virtual atomicity, an one-stop service provider (OSP) must deliver a sense of seamlessness to service requestors. Consequently, an OSP needs to provide not only bundling transparency, i.e. hide that a "virtually atomic" service is actually enacted and delivered by invoking multiple lower-level services that may exchange data, synchronize their work/control flows and produce results finally composed into an atomic response, but also bundling management, i.e. the actual coordination mechanisms that take care of invocation, interaction and synchronization of the bundled services. The issue of service bundling management, which is central to the provision of one-stop services, poses some hard problems on the operational level. Talking in an eGovernment context, virtual one-stop e-Government services such as the issue of a business permit or the declaration of a change of address correspond, due to public sector functional disintegration, to bundles of multiple atomic services which, in the general case, are delivered by multiple providers. Therefore, it should be noted that (a) one-stop provision of bundled e-Government services entails multiple service providers and, what is more, (b) the technology that is used by individual providers for providing their share of bundled services cannot be assumed to be interoperable (in extreme cases, technology may not be used at all or only in an old-fashioned, merely esoteric, way). What is more, these providers being public agencies that are governed by complex or fuzzy regulatory frameworks in the general case, (c) their internal workflows may contain complex, multi-conditional portions, portions that cannot be modelled deterministically and many cases of exceptions. One-stop e-Government services are required not only in an intra-border (i.e. local, regional or national), but also in a cross-border context; consider, for example, issuing work permits for immigrants or paying in country X a freelance worker based in country Y. Such as situation is additionally complicated since (d) public service providers from different countries will normally operate in different languages and be governed by non-harmonised regulatory frameworks and, apart from that, (e) it is quite risky to assume a given service level (e.g. response time, exactitude and completeness of response) from a public service provider in a country other than one’s own; sometimes, a response cannot even be assumed at all within a reasonable amount of time. 266 Dimitris Gouscos et al.