The component philosophy

Governments across the world have taken very different approaches to the challenges of e-government. In some cases, large top-down IT projects have been created to put key services online. In other jurisdictions, the emphasis has been on web-enabled access to information and applying metadata standards.

In New Zealand there is an emphasis on providing the tools and technologies for agencies to undertake their own e-government initiatives, based on the needs of their stakeholders and the imperatives of their businesses. This is both a pragmatic and philosophic approach; agencies are best equipped to know what is required, and the E-government Unit is best equipped to support the decisions and directions of the agencies and relate these to the wider public sector environment. In effect, the EGU's role is primarily one of leadership, rather than as a provider of extensive centralised infrastructure, although the EGU does own and operate infrastructure in selected cases.

Much of the E-government Unit's recent activities have focused on providing a "retail" presence, in the form of the all-of-government portal at www.govt.nz. While a useful initiative in its own right, it does tend to act as an unintentional focus by promoting the thinking that e-government is mostly about websites. Yet a public-facing portal is really only a minor manifestation of the real work done by the EGU; the primary work of e-government is in the back office, not on the web server.

The major focus of e-government in the next few years will be on enterprise application integration (EAI). The effective intercommunication of agencies and their systems is the goal of practically all e-government initiatives, and it is clear that this interoperation can only take place if the standards, capabilities and systems are managed in a structured fashion. This is the real role of the EGU, and is best achieved through thought leadership, standards setting and collaboration with agencies on specific projects.

With the focus on EAI comes a change of emphasis - the EGU needs to provide mechanisms by which outcomes are achieved, whilst agencies continue to focus on the outcomes themselves. Agencies know their stakeholders, constituents and business requirements, and can therefore best decide for themselves how goals should be achieved. The EGU can provide the tools, standards and capabilities for agencies to then reach those goals in a structured, timely and cost-effective manner. In the LEGO analogy, the EGU acquires, co-ordinates and standardises building blocks, whilst agencies assemble them.

It's worth noting that the EGU is not primarily a factory for components; that is, it does not produce all the component used by agencies. While individual components can be commissioned by the EGU, a greater number of blocks are likely to come from vendors, external integration partners and agencies themselves. The EGU then has a role in standardising the blocks so agencies have the confidence they will interoperate as intended.

The component philosophy can be summed up as follows:

• E-government is about creating new components, not about the eventual form they take. Co-ordinating standardised components is the business of the EGU, but assembling structures to meet the need of citizens is the business of agencies.

• To ensure all components can be clipped together, standards need to be developed and applied. This standards-setting and enforcement process is a key part of what the EGU does, as the lack of standards will mean the failure of both the component factory and the component assemblers.

• Some components are more critical than others. There may well be specialist components that are tailored to specific solutions, but the most important components are the standard ones that can be used for a huge range of assemblies. And the critical components must adhere most tightly to the component standards.

• There will always be a requirement for new and different types of components, so the EGU must be skilled at finding, designing, acquiring and promulgating new designs, whilst ensuring they are compatible with all previous components.

• There are a number of different sources for components. These can include the EGU, government agencies and the private sector, and the EGU has a role to facilitate the harmonization of component creation across all these different factories. This may well involve standardising components created by agencies for their own internal purposes, and making it available across the public sector.

• The Government governs the component manufacturing process, but its primary stakeholders are the assemblers, so agencies must be involved in how the process is run and the decision-making about what type of blocks are manufactured.

These principles are largely common sense, but - as Mies Van Der Rohe noted - God is in the details. The next sections aim to articulate how the component philosophy guides the development of individual EGU projects and their integration, but first we will look at some examples of how the component approach can be applied to agency projects.