In the space of eGovernance, from a technology perspective, one can never be complacent and think, enough has been done. The emerging technologies are fast evolving and so too the application areas. “It’s important to widen the scope from system to ecosystems and have a global thinking,” says, J Satyanarayana, Chairman, UIDAI. Followed by having an enterprise architecture, which aligns both the business and technology at the enterprise level. It has to absorb the various emerging technologies in a seamless way without disturbing the underlying base. This is followed by fixing digital service standards. For any business or Government, quality of service getting delivered to the end user is of importance. It can be either through the partner or service provider. The last aspect is to have teams which will have the necessary ethos to deliver a superior digital experience.
Systems to ecosystems
Over the last few decades, many new systems have been launched in a variety of sectors like digital ID, digital payments, health, education, smart cities, eBiz, Jobs, logistics, etc. GSTN is a classic example of an ecosystem. It has been built with API based architecture, wherein the platform is connected with multiple entities at the same time. The time has come to ponder and think, is it good enough ? “It’s required we think of these sectors, to convert them into ecosystems and what can be done to do so. They have organic growth and permits expansion horizontally and vertically on its own without any effort,” says Satyanarayana.
Need of national ecosystems
Aadhaar is the platform, which is built as an ecosystem. It can seamlessly interoperate with other systems. So is the case with digital payments. Both are horizontal in nature. They are not restricted to specific business verticals but applies across businesses.
In the area of health, Ayushman Bharat is being built as an ecosystem, “I have had the fortune and privilege working with the Ministry for Ayushman Bharat, on how can it be build as an ecosystem,” says Satyanarayana. Likewise, it applies to the primary sector. The attempt of the central Government is to double the income of the farmers, which can only be made possible by creating an ecosystem, without which it will take a long time to achieve the target, i.e by 2022.
Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) is also an area, where ecosystems can be applied to make sure there are no delays and the business is done without any hiccups, thereby multiplying the volumes. This will increase the GDP and add to economic growth. Jobs is another sector, where an ecosystem can provide employees with the required skillsets and create match between the employees and employers.
Pre-requisites for ecosystems
What does it take to create an ecosystem ? At a very high level, it requires a set of architectures, a coupling of business processes and technology to deliver the vision followed by open standards to allow for interoperability and networking of systems with utmost ease.
Once open standards are adopted, it further facilitates open data, subject to rights of security. Opening up the data makes the ecosystems thrive, when a number of service providers will design applications using the data. Each of these ecosystems need to have their respective business models, in the absence of which, they will not develop and survive. The last pre-requisite is, regulating the data. The open data will have Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which will have to be protected.
India Enterprise Architecture Framework (IndEA)
In order for the Government to work as one entity and not thousands of departments running in silos, the IndEA has been designed. It’s not an architecture in itself but a guideline, set of principles, reference models applicable for the ministries of the GoI, states and UTs, PSUs, that fulfills about 60 percent of the work to design the architecture and the rest can be completed by the architecture itself. “I was the head of the working group that designed the IndEA. It is under consideration before the Ministry of IT and soon will be notified,” says Satyanarayana.
There are eight reference models of IndEA. It starts with public service: Efficiency, quality and KPI followed by the applications that will deliver the services; the data, security, technology architecture and making sure that how the system falls into place correctly inspite of having a federated structure.
Digital service standard (DSS)
Any digital service has to be developed for rich user experience. It’s important to keep the digital experience as lean as possible. The citizens are already accessing a number of websites online. Thus it’s imperative to have a short learning curve of accessing the digital services. A digital service lifecycle has been created which is divided in four parts: define, realise, measure and governing the digital service. “I am also chairing the working group created by the Ministry of IT to put in place the digital service standards. It’s a sixty page document. Even if a particular government has already designed such a DSS, they can compare their DSS with ours with the help of a digital service standard matrix,” suggests Satyanarayana. This will help in self assessment on where the government stand and how far or close are they towards delivering efficient digital services.
J Satyanarayana also showcased ePragati, the egovernance platform created by Andhra Pradesh, which inherently has the ecosystem characteristics. The value proposition provided by ePragati is to deliver citizen centric services with having a ONE Government approach and which supports the sustainable development goals (SDGs).
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