Components and the e-government strategy

The component approach articulates how agencies can use standardised components to build business solutions. But how does this approach tie into the e-government strategy, and what are the relationships between the components and other EGU models, such as the service delivery architecture?

Why, what and how

The e-government strategy is all about the Government's goals and ambitions for how government will function in an electronically connected world, and articulates a vision for the future:

1. By June 2004 the Internet will be the dominant means of enabling ready access to government information, services and processes.

2. By June 2007, Internet technologies and organisational models will be integral to the delivery of government to New Zealanders.

3. By June 2010, the operation of government will have been transformed through its use of the Internet.

To help make this vision a reality, the EGU has articulated the direction of the e-government programme in its strategy. This is the "why" of e-government - the benefits to New Zealand, the local and international drivers behind e-government, the broad outline of the shape various governmental initiatives will take and how it expects agencies to respond.

The strategy also contains the service delivery architecture - the "what" of e-government. It explains how the various conceptual components fit together in order to deliver the access, delivery and transformation goals in the strategy. The diagram of the architecture on the following page is used in the strategy documents to help explain the concepts.

While this is usefully informative for audiences that are new to the concepts and ideas around e-government, it is aimed at the business process level and therefore lacks the detail to describe how the various technical components will interoperate; it is the "what" of e-government. In effect, it's like the picture on the outside of the LEGO box, describing what can finally be built.

The purpose of the component architecture - and the goal of this paper - is to describe the blocks themselves, and how they can be joined together to create value for government agencies. It's the "how" of e-government.

As can be seen, this paper is only part of the e-government story. Key parts of the "how" layer - including the e-GIF - are discussed separately in other papers, and so readers are encouraged to look at both the concepts and ideas in the component architecture in the context of the vision, strategy and goals for e-government in New Zealand.