icegov2012 proceedings

Toward Interoperable Government - A Case of Bangladesh
ABSTRACT
Despite several efforts of the Government, Bangladesh is far away
to integrate and interconnect various public agencies, their
processes and applications. So people and public agencies are
affected by inconsistent public services/reports/documents. This
article addresses the initiatives and progresses to integrate systems
so that future e-government programs could be scaled up to
achieve interoperability.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
D.2.12 [Interoperability]: Integration Different Public
Information Systems – Data Mapping
General Terms
Management, Measurement, Documentation, Performance,
Design, Economics, Trust, Reliability, Security, Human Factors,
Standardization, Legal Aspects, Verification
Keywords
Interoperability, Integrity, eGovernment, Information Systems,
eGIF, Public eService, Digital Bangladesh
1. INTRODUCTION
In Bangladesh, as of today each of the public agencies has been
exercising to establish separate information systems for their own
needs. Different public agencies developed their database systems
aimed at strengthening public service delivery and creating
accountability of services. But there was hardly any
interoperability guideline or common promises among those
systems. Consequently the efforts of the potential public agencies
resulted developing several duplicate infrastructures and
processes, and gradually it becomes more complex and expensive
to achieve interoperability.
2. INTEROPERABILITY
Interoperability refers to the technical ability of communications
among different systems to maintain interrelationships among
systems and or processes. Pardo and Burke [5] articulated that
Government interoperability is the combination of policy,
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ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
M. Shakhawat Hossain Bhuiyan
Economic Relations Division, Government of Bangladesh
+880-1552-370267
shbhuiyan@hotmail.com
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management, and technology capabilities needed by a network of
organizations to deliver coordinated services [3]. The e-
Government Interoperability Framework (eGIF) sets out
government’s technical policies, architectural design and
standards as well as specifications of services and guidelines in
order to facilitate interoperability and integration across the public
sector agencies. The UNDP eGovernment interoperability guide
(2007) identifies seven key principles (e.g. interoperability,
scalability, reusability, open standards, market support, security,
privacy etc.) that are roughly used as the criteria for choosing the
standards in developing those eGIFs, The guide also recognizes
three key dimensions (or domains) of interoperability-
organizational, semantic (or informational) and technical.
3. MAJOR PUBLIC DATABASES
In spite of several contemporary policies and initiatives, there is
still absence of a standard database management guideline among
the service provider, which precludes interoperable public eservice
development. At present, there are several important
public databases as described below:
3.1 National Voter ID
The largest Government database in Bangladesh is Voter ID
database (about 86 million voters), also referred to as future
National ID database which is maintained by Bangladesh Election
Commission (BEC). Obviously, this is not a complete National ID
database as it excludes the citizens under 18 years, the minimum
age to become an eligible voter. On the other hand, the BEC did
not verify information when its database was prepared. It has
included in the database whatever information was given by an
individual. The voter ID card has been helping in disciplined and
organized vote casting during last few national elections.
3.2 Birth Registration
The second largest public database is the Birth Registration
Information System (BRIS) which was established recently. The
birth information is stored on the centralized database server and
the framework has been designed so that it is interoperable with
other databases and information systems of the country. For
example, The Birth Registration Number (BRN) is 17 digits and
similar to National ID Number.
3.3 Machine Readable Passport (MRP)
Bangladesh recently established Machine Readable Passport
(MRP) and Machine Readable Visa (MRV) elevating the
country’s passport and visa system to an international standard in
order to comply with the International Civil Aviation
Organization (ICAO) requirements.