The countries with remarkable e-governance initiatives are New Zealand, Canada and Singapore. E-Government in the United States was especially driven by the 1998 Government Paperwork Elimination Act and by President Clinton’s December 17, 1999, Memorandum on E-Government, which ordered the top 500 forms used by citizens to be placed online by December 2000. The memorandum also directed agencies to construct a secure E-Government infrastructure.
Various technological changes have emerged and are affecting the e-governance scenario, they include
Web 2.0 – Web 2.0 describes web sites that use technology beyond the static pages of earlier web sites. It does not refer to new technology, but to changes in development and usage of web pages. A Web 2.0 web site usually allows users to interact and collaborate with each other just like in society similarly user generates content in a virtual community. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and video sharing sites.
Since 2003, a new wave of web-based applications, which now go under the name of web 2.0, have been launched with very little investment and have encountered dramatic success in terms of take-up. These applications rely on the concept of the user as a producer of content (blog, wiki, Flickr), taste/emotion (Last.fm, de.li.cious), contacts (MySpace), and reputation/feedback (eBay, TripAdvisor).
While Web 2.0 has captured the media’s attention, the vast majority of citizens and businesses are comfortable in the Web 1.0 world. As a result government shouldn’t neglect its ‘traditional’ online offerings. As with any online initiative, government Web 2.0 approaches should be fundamentally based on a set of core principles
- What solutions will deliver the greatest benefit to citizens and businesses?
- Which of these are most likely to be adopted and used?
- What are their likely costs and ease of implementation?
- How effectively can associated risks by managed?
SOA – SOA or Service-Oriented Architecture, is an application architecture in which all functions, or services, are defined using a description language and have invokable interfaces that are called to perform business processes. As interfaces are platform-independent, a client from any device using any operating system in any language can use the service.
Service-oriented architectures have the following key features
- SOA services have self-describing interfaces in platform-independent XML documents. Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is the standard used to describe the services.
- SOA services communicate with messages formally defined via XML Schema (also called XSD).
- SOA services are maintained in the organizations by a registry that acts as a directory listing.
- Each SOA service has a quality of service (QoS) associated with it.
SOA with its loosely coupled nature allows organizations to plug in new services or upgrade existing services in a granular fashion to address the new business requirements, provides the option to make the services consumable across different channels, and exposes the existing enterprise and legacy applications as services, thereby safeguarding existing IT infrastructure investments.
Cloud computing – It refers to a type of Internet-based computing, where different IT services like servers, storage and applications, are delivered to user’s computers and devices through the Internet.
Five features of cloud computing are
- On-demand self service – Consumers can use the cloud service i.e., computing capabilities, network storage and application 24/7 without any human interaction with cloud service provider.
- Broad network access – Cloud computing capabilities are available on Internet which can be accessed through standard
- mechanism by both thick and thin clients (laptops, mobile phones, PDAs etc).
- Resource pooling – Physical and virtual resources are assigned and re-assigned to the consumers according to their
- demand using multi tenant model.
- Rapid elasticity – Cloud computing has the ability to scale resources both up and down as needed. The cloud appears to be infinite to the consumers, and the consumer can purchase as much or as little computing power according to their need.
- Measured service – Measured services are one of the essential characteristics of the cloud computing where services and resources usage is constantly monitored, controlled and reported for fair pay-as-you-go model implementation.
The three cloud delivery models are
- Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS): Cloud consumers use software applications, but do not control the operating system
- hardware or network infrastructure on which they are running.
- Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS): Cloud consumers use the platform upon which applications can be developed and executed.
- Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Cloud consumers use basic computing resources such as processing power, storage, networking components or middleware on demand.
Cloud computing is gaining prominence in e-governance due to various benefits as against the traditional rollout of E-Government projects, as government services are available by internet, it is available 24×7 anytime and anywhere. It also enables quick deployment of new applications or update to existing applications as by quickly updating or launching new functionality in the website.
Big Data – It is used to describe a massive volume of both structured and unstructured data that is so large that it’s difficult to process using traditional database and software techniques. The challenges include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis and visualization. Few examples of big data are
- VISA processes more than 172,800,000 card transactions each day.4
- 500 million tweets are sent per day. That’s more than 5,700 tweets per second.
- Facebook has more than 1.15 billion active users generating social interaction data.
After Edward Snowden’s (a former National Security Agency) revelation of US Government’s surveillance programme, Prism, for cyber espionage, it focused the processing and analytics of vast data in audio, voice chats, emails, images by big data. However, though big data is being used for national security purposes, it could be equally useful in reforming the government and citizen interface. Big data analytics of conversation on social media space can help in shaping manifestoes of political parties. If government observes people’s perception over social media then, it can analyze trend and make an algorithm with data points, if 80% of data points start working in single direction, then it shows empirically there is unrest in a particular territory. This could lead to preventive action but, the issues of privacy and data security equally need to be debated.