Rapid Development of Electronic Public Services - International ...

Rapid Development of Electronic Public Services –
A Case Study in Electronic Licensing Service
Tomasz Janowski, Adegboyega Ojo, Elsa Estevez
United Nations University, International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST)
P.O. Box 3058, Macau
+853 5040443
ABSTRACT
The availability of Electronic Public Services (EPS) is essential
for achieving meaningful e-Government. As governments deliver
many services to citizens, businesses and other customers, making
all these services available online requires a systematic and
rigorous approach. A crucial element in this approach is the
availability of an Infrastructure to enable rapid EPS development.
This demo presents an Electronic Licensing (e-Licensing) Service
developed upon a prototype Software Infrastructure for EPS. The
Infrastructure comprises: (1) frameworks for design of Front-
Office and Back-Office applications, (2) services for workflow
management and cross-agency messaging, and (3) an
Infrastructure Management Service. The demo shows the process
of developing an EPS upon the EPS Infrastructure and
demonstrates the various use cases of the e-Licensing application
rapidly developed upon the Infrastructure. This work was done in
the context of the e-Macao Project, funded by the Government of
Macao SAR to build a foundation for e-Government in Macao.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.4 [Information Systems Application]: Software Infrastructure
General Terms
Design, Standardization, Measurement, Reliability
Keywords
Electronic Licensing Services, Electronic Public Service,
Software Infrastructure, Rapid Application Development
1. INTRODUCTION
Licensing services entail granting various kinds of government
permissions to citizens, businesses, visitors, associations, etc. We
can identify at least three types of permissions: (1) Licensure –
right to practice, (2) Certification – right to title, and (3) Permit -
right to perform a regulated task. Licensing services constitute a
major category of authorization services [1] offered by
governments. Examples include: construction license, import and
export license, trademark registration and driving license.
An Electronic Licensing Service (e-Licensing) is expected to
support the application, processing and issuance phases of
licensing services by providing electronic channels for actors -
applicants, agency staff and third-parties - to interact with one
another. The primary channel for the applicant is the Internet,
agency staff would typically interact through agency Intranets,
{tj, ao, elsa}@iist.unu.edu
while the interactions between agencies and third-party
organizations are facilitated by specialized and secure messaging
applications available within internal networks of all parties
concerned. It is also possible for applicants to use mobile devices
to interact with the licensing agency, for instance to request for
the status of an application.
In this paper we demonstrate the process of rapidly developing an
e-Licensing application based on a software infrastructure for EPS
(developed by the authors and other collaborators) and step
through the major components of the e-Licensing System through
a series of use cases. Through these use cases, we reveal the
features of the five major aspects of the e-Licensing System and
indirectly the operations of the underlying software infrastructure.
2. REQUIREMENTS
In addition to typical non-functional requirements like reliability,
availability, extensibility, maintainability and user-friendliness, a
typical e-Licensing system is expected to support a number of
core functional requirements. We can identify three categories of
such requirements to support: (1) the applicant in submitting its
application and subsequently tracking the status of the
application; (2) the Front-Office staff in establishing correctness
and completeness of the submitted applications and assessing
eligibility of the applicant; (3) the Back-Office staff in certifying
submitted information, processing the license application, seeking
information and opinions on the application from other agencies,
and communicating the outcome to the applicant. The use cases in
Figure 1 cover all three categories of requirements. These use
cases will drive the demonstration session later.
Figure 1. e-Licensing Service – Use Cases

3. INFRASTRUCTURE
The e-Licensing Service was developed using the software
infrastructure for EPS described in [3][4][6][7]. The infrastructure
consists of two frameworks for developing Front-Office (FO) and
Back-Office (BO) applications and two services - Workflow
Service and Messaging Service. It also provides a set of services
for managing the infrastructure. The FO and BO Frameworks
were used for developing the FO and BO parts of the e-License
application. The Workflow Service was used to execute the
concrete business process underpinning the licensing service. The
Messaging Service was used by the BO application to exchange
messages with third-party agencies. The Management Service was
used to control the whole e-Licensing application.
4. DEVELOPMENT
The e-Licensing Service was developed according to the generic
process for building all infrastructure-enabled EPS:
1) Specify requirements inline with generic EPS requirements;
2) Develop the system architecture for e-Licensing using generic
EPS architecture as a reference model;
3) Develop the FO part of e-Licensing by defining additional
request schemas, modifying existing ones, and customizing
the FO Framework components to obtain the FO Application;
4) Defining business processes for the licensing service, one for
new license application and another for application tracking,
and deploying them using the Workflow Service;
5) Binding each process step to the BO application;
6) Setting up message queues using configuration files;
7) Integrating FO, Workflow and BO Applications using queues;
8) Testing the e-Licensing system over each request type.
5. DEMONSTRATION
Following the use cases depicted in Figure 1, the demonstration of
the e-Licensing Service applies the following steps:
1) Submit Application – We show how the applicant: (a) obtains
guidelines for submitting the application, (b) submits the
application and (c) submits supporting documents.
2) Verify Application - We demonstrate how the FO officer: (a)
views the application, (b) checks completeness of supporting
documents and (c) requests additional information.
3) Establish Eligibility - We show how the FO officer: (a)
establishes eligibility of the applicant and (b) dispatches the
application to the Back Office for further processing.
4) Certify Information - We demonstrate how the BO officer: (a)
views applications received from the FO, (b) validates the
applications and (c) seeks opinions from other agencies.
5) Obtain Opinions - We show how the BO officer: (a) requests
information or opinions on the submitted application from
other agencies and (b) receives responses from these agencies.
6) Make Decision – We demonstrates how the BO officer or
deciding authority: (a) views relevant information and
opinions on the application and (b) makes decision.
7) Notify Applicant – We show how: (a) the outcome of the
submitted application is communicated to the applicant and
(b) how information is requested from applicant.
8) Track Application - We demonstrate how the applicant can
track the progress or status of his or her application.
A particular e-Licensing service - applying for a license to run a
Food and Beverage business - was chosen in this demonstration.
With minimal changes to the system, other variants of e-Licensing
services can be supported. This can be easily achieved through the
steps 1-8. Figure 2 provides a screenshot of the system.
Figure 2. e-Licensing Service – Screenshot
5. CONCLUSIONS
We have shown how a generic Electronic Licensing Service can
be rapidly developed upon a Software Infrastructure for EPS,
following a systematic, rigorous development process. The e-
Macao website www.emacao.gov.mo provides more details.
6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We wish to thank the whole e-Macao Team, particularly Gabriel
Oteniya, for their contribution to infrastructure development.
7. REFERENCES
[1] Peristeras V., and Tarabanis, K. Governance Enterprise
Architecture (GEA): Domain Models for E-Governance,
(Ed.) Marijn Janssen, ICEC’04, 6 th International Conference
on E-Commerce, ACM, 2004.
[2] Ojo, A., Janowski, T., Oteniya, G., and Estevez, E.,
Infrastructure Support for e-Government – An Overview, e-
Macao Project Report 6, Aug. 2006.
[3] Ojo, A., Chu, T. I., Oteniya, G., Tou C. P., and Janowski, T.,
Front-Office Framework for e-Government, – Development
Report, e-Macao Project Report 8, 2006
[4] Estevez, E., Wan, C., Wong, C. T., Ojo, A., Oteniya, G., and
Janowski, T., Back Office Framework for e-Government, e-
Macao Report 9, 2006
[5] Ojo, A., Oteniya, G., Chau K. F., Estevez, E., Janowski, T.,
Electronic Delivery of Licensing Services, e-Macao Report
5, Oct. 2005
[6] Janowski T., and Estevez, E., Extensible Message Gateway
for e-Government, e-Macao Report 11, Aug. 2006.
[7] Ojo, A., Oteniya, G., and Janowski, T., Infrastructure
Management Services for e-Government, e-Macao Project
Report 12, Aug. 2006.