Abstract
Future eGovernment technology platforms could consist of a reliable, ubiquitous infrastructure that supports systems and applications assembled out of readily-available, re-usable components. However, realization of this possibility requires research in various domains including whether and how a building block-oriented ICT-industry could develop, and what types of architectures, building blocks, and standards are needed.
Keywords
infrastructures, building blocks, architectures, standards
Description
Grounding the research on Cyberinfrastructures for eGovernment
Currently, many new architecture and infrastructure solutions are emerging. Service-oriented-architectures and shared services centres have the potential to reform the ICT sector and system development. Questions of open source solutions are interfering here as well. However, proper business models for such new infrastructures are lacking so far.
Current efforts around new innovative cyber infrastructures are with a rather narrow scope and impact (e.g. high-speed access). These are not aimed at supporting the services on top of the cyber infrastructure to enable horizontal and vertical collaboration. Looking beyond the next few years, new opportunities will arise and considerations have to include the impacts on new services, and new service sharing and collaboration. A vision is to have a large collection of building blocks that can be used for creating any kind of system.
Scalability and reusability of services across different processes are still major barriers due to semantic differences. Another problem is the connection and interoperability among building blocks. While there are some standards, they have different life-cycles and various applications. The development of standards can create a new building blocks industry enabling governments to rapidly assemble new systems out-of-existing building blocks. Yet, there is no overview of current building blocks nor do we have business models that create added value. We have no evidence whether such a building blocks industry would work in eGovernment settings, in which situations these can be used, if these are reliable, and so on.
Research question
- How can we create a building block industry for e-government?
- How will a Building block industry look like?
- What are feasible business models?
- How can we create a repository of building blocks (broker)?
- How can building blocks be made scalable?
- How can we ensure secure, reliable and available services?
- What are the conditions and incentives for creating a building block industry?
- How to create standards for enabling a new building block industry?
- How to create a cyber infrastructure enabling collaboration among all levels of government (horizontal and vertical)?
Link to the final eight scenarios
