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2006 e-Government Strategy, Responsive Government: A New Service Agenda

Appendix A - A service oriented architecture

The concept of connected government was outlined in the Management Advisory Committee report Connecting Government: Whole of Government Responses to Australia’s Priority Challenges (2004).

The detailed vision for connected government by 2010 is outlined in section two of this strategy. To deliver the vision, government agencies will be required to implement connected government in a practical way through their information technology systems and business processes. This strategy includes actions designed to plan and implement connected government.

A.1 Existing foundations

The government has largely developed the foundations for connected government, as outlined in its Access and Distribution Strategy for Australian Government Services (2006).

Figure 3 - Australian Government Service Delivery Principles

The Access and Distribution Strategy provides a conceptual whole of government roadmap to the planning, capability development, delivery and review phases.

It incorporates several frameworks which together form the foundations of connected government. They flesh out the detail of the individual elements of the Access and Distribution Strategy:

Despite the availability of these frameworks, the government has not yet taken full advantage of the opportunities presented through its investment in technology. These frameworks are not sufficient on their own. More is needed to enable cross-agency collaboration to occur as a matter of course, rather than only as one-off collaborative projects. What is now exceptional should become the norm.

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A.2 Connected architecture

To guide departments and agencies, the government will develop an architectural model of how its service delivery vision will be implemented using the collection of frameworks and standards in the Access and Distribution Strategy—in effect, a cross‑agency service oriented architecture (SOA).

A Service Oriented Architecture is a framework, consisting of principles and standards for designing and developing computer systems, so that each service provided by the system exists as a discreet module that can also be used by other systems.

Such an architecture supports standard ways of processing, re‑use of systems, interoperability, single sources of authoritative information and improved return on investment.

SOA governance calls for a careful balance between central power and distributed development and operation. The central power must enable interoperability without destroying the benefits gained from distributed, loosely connected services.

Considerable work has already been undertaken on SOA within some government agencies. The cross-agency architecture will build on existing work wherever possible. The cross-agency SOA will not attempt to outline an architecture for the entire Australian Government, at least not in the initial stages. It is more practical to divide the cross-agency SOA into three separate architectural clusters, reflecting natural agency and citizen groups:

The architecture will not specify to agencies how their entire ICT and business processes need to be structured. An SOA does not mean that all compliant services must be open and readily available for re-use. Access can be restricted. Nonetheless, for the benefit of future flexibility, all services should comply with the cross-agency SOA.

The cross-agency SOA will comprise:

A.2.1 Common SOA elements

Some of the elements of the cross-agency SOA, perhaps most of them, already exist to some extent inside agencies, or are in the process of being designed or constructed. The intention is to identify the required cross-agency components, and determine the extent to which they already exist in a single-agency form.

The following elements are candidates for inclusion in the cross-agency SOA. Current examples from different agencies are highlighted and may be used to kick-start selected pathway projects.

Identity management

Sound identity management will be critical to implementing connected government while respecting privacy and complying with privacy legislation.

In the education sector, the Department of Education, Science and Training has allocated a unique student identifier - called a Commonwealth Higher Education Student Support Number, or CHESSN, to over 700,000 university students for the purpose of administering the Higher Education Support Act. The department is also involved in a Learner Identity Management Framework project which is exploring the case for a national identification framework in education at sectoral, jurisdictional and cross-jurisdictional levels. In the business sector, the Australian Taxation Office provides a business identity validation service to other government agencies.

Simplified and single sign-on

The Department of Human Services is developing an approach to a single sign-on facility which will operate across all of its six agencies. Once developed, it will enable people to sign-on just once to one of the agencies, and then access their accounts in any of the other five agencies. Current work in Centrelink regarding citizen authentication is likely to be central to the approach adopted in the Department of Human Services.

User account repositories

The Business Entry Point, hosted by the Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources, provides the Transaction Manager, a web-based tool accessible via business.gov.au. It enables businesses to find, manage and complete the forms, applications and transactions they regularly carry out with all levels of government, such as registering for an ABN, applying for licences and paying rates.

Transaction Manager enables users to: search for transactions; group and complete a series of individual transactions; store personal or business details in profiles to automatically pre-fill online forms; and maintain records of completed, incomplete and visited transactions.The Department of Human Services is actively exploring user account functionality for its six agencies, which would be accessed through the proposed single sign-on facility.

The Australian Business Register is an online service of the Australian Taxation Office that allows businesses to register for an ABN online and update and maintain their registration and personal details. The Australian Business Register also provides a public search facility allowing businesses and individuals to check the registration details of businesses in relation to their presence in the Tax system.

More than 50 per cent of all business registrations are processed in the Australian Business Register through online lodgement.

Interoperability with the State Revenue Offices is at the project scoping stage. If successful, this will streamline processes for business by making single data updates in multiple systems (across agencies). The Australian Taxation Office has targeted July 2006 for implementation.

Consent models and systems

Consent models will be intrinsic to identity management processes, simple and single sign-on facilities and to user account repositories. Under the Australian Government’s privacy legislation, the informed consent of citizens, businesses and organisations is essential to agencies’ ability to provide connected government. While existing initiatives intrinsically include consent as part of their design, consent models will need their own explicit focus to implement connected government.

Authoritative source models and interfaces

ComLaw, incorporating the Federal Register of Legislative Instruments (FRLI) is the legal information retrieval system owned by the Attorney-General's Department. ComLaw is an integral part of the Australian Law Online initiative to provide the community with low or no-cost access to the law.

Comlaw serves as the Australian Government’s legislative authoritative source. It contains Commonwealth primary legislation, as well as other ancillary documents and information, in electronic form. Since 1 January 2005, ComLaw has also contained the FRLI, as the authoritative source for legislative instruments and compilations of legislative instruments.

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Web services standards and interfaces

Several agencies are implementing web services and the open standards which underpin web services.

The Australian Taxation Office is using web services and similar techniques to enable individual taxpayers (and from 2006, also their tax agents) to use the ‘Etax’ electronic tax return lodgement facility to pre-populate their tax returns with net medical expenses information from Medicare Australia, as well as Centrelink entitlement data.

Pre-population is a process of drawing together available information that will allow taxpayers and their agents to correctly complete online transactions such as annual income tax returns.

The Medicare Australia and Centrelink information was provided through Etax on a pilot basis (for a finite group of users) from July 2005 and is expected to be available for all users from July 2006.

These three agencies are also working together to develop the use of Australian Taxation Office data to assist in correctly completing transactions in both Centrelink and Medicare Australia. Using XML standards, the Business Entry Point at business.gov.au, hosted by the Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources, shares content with other websites regularly visited by businesses such as banks, industry associations and local councils. Content syndication means business operators no longer need to go from one government website to another in search of information.

The Australian Taxation Office has been working with OASIS (an international open standards development forum) to develop approaches to open standards for tax compliance reporting.

The Australian Taxation Office has endorsed the XBRL (extensible Business Reporting Language) standard. This open standard was initially developed for business and account record keeping. It has been adopted in the Netherlands on the basis of a reduced ‘cost of compliance’ for their economy. XBRL has been accepted as a standard by the Australian Taxation Office, which will discuss its wider adoption with key stakeholders.

Over the past year or so the Department of Education, Science and Training has established an interface with all state and territory State Training Authorities (STAs). The interface allows the electronic exchange of information between these authorities and New Apprenticeship Centres, which are the department’s contracted service providers for the New Apprenticeships programme.

The interface already provides for the lodgement of Training Contracts, the primary indenture document for an apprenticeship or traineeship. The electronic interface reduces the time it takes to finalise a training contract from a couple of weeks to a couple of days. Data exchange functionality is being enhanced for broader use including, for example, to facilitate updates of contracts, reduce manual and duplicate data input, improve veracity of data held in discrete systems and improve business processes and service quality to clients and other users.

The data access and exchange uses XML schema agreed between the parties, a secure web access communications channel, and security architecture and authentication provided by the department’s Training and Youth Internet Management System.

Techniques for exposing all business processes as web services

The Department of Environment and Heritage, in conjunction with the National Land and Water Resources Audit, is developing an environmental report card system. The system will use web services to draw live data held within both Australian and state/territory government agencies and deliver summarised information on natural resource management themes. This will provide community and government access to the latest natural resource management data at a national scale, from a single source.

The CSIRO and the Department of Environment and Heritage are jointly developing the Australian Biodiversity Information Facility (ABIF). It is aimed at coordinating access to species data in the Australian context. This project involves data sharing via the web between Australian museums and herbaria, as well as between other government agencies and international bodies. Part of the project is to develop or provide access to distributed analytical tools that can draw on this data.

‘Translation’ facilities to enable data from one agency to be used by another

The Australian Customs Service, with the help of a number of relevant agencies at the Federal, state and territory level, is developing a Standardised Data Set (SDS) to apply across the whole of government to regulate import, export and transit movements of cargo, conveyances and crew.

Fifty-seven agencies at the Federal, state and territory level share an interest in international trade information, with 41 of these agencies requesting data directly from the trading community. Drawing the bulk of these interests together using a common standard and set of definitions for data, and a system where information submitted once is used many times, has significant potential benefits for the trading community and for governments.

The adoption of a standard data set opens the possibility of developing a single entry point for the trade and transport industry to deal online with government. This would allow relevant parties to lodge standardised information and documents at a single entry point to fulfil all import, export and transit-related regulatory requirements.

Security standards and modules

The Protective Security Manual (PSM) and the Australian Government Information and Communications Technology Security Manual (also known as ACSI 33) provide the security framework within which the Australian Government operates. The Australian Government e-Authentication Framework (AGAF), with supporting whole of government authentication standards, provide a consistent, whole of government approach to authentication of businesses that conduct electronic transactions with government bodies. Within these and related frameworks, the Australian Taxation Office public key infrastructure (PKI) provides businesses with digital certificates so they can authenticate themselves to gain access to personalised services within the Business Portal and Electronic Commerce Interface. This infrastructure was developed and implemented prior to July 2000 and is now used by more than 300,000 businesses.

As a result of the review of the Gatekeeper Policy, Australian Taxation Office Digital Certificates can now be used by businesses to access other government agency online transactions.

A pilot extending the use of Australian Taxation Office digital certificates to other agencies commenced on 17 October 2005. Through this pilot, 200 businesses that deal online with Centrelink will use their Australian Taxation Office digital certificates to authenticate themselves and gain access to secure Centrelink services.

Use of Australian Taxation Office digital certificates by businesses to access secure/authenticated services across multiple agencies will provide major cost savings for the government. More importantly, it means that a business may need only one security ‘credential’ to deal online with a range of agencies, making interaction with government both easier and more secure.

A repository of reusable designs and systems

Centrelink is trialling a repository of designs and systems called GovDex. GovDex features Reuse-IT—a catalogue of design solutions developed by agencies to respond to challenges of connected government. It will promote information re-use, improvement of technical alignment across agencies, and the rationalisation of development costs.

A.2.2 Common standards

The cross-agency SOA will be based as far as possible on open reference standards that have been developed by international bodies, such as the:

These organisations have established standards in areas such as reliable and secure delivery of messages and semantic standards. While the specifics of most ‘e-business’ standards differ from government requirements, the general specification will be the same, as will the methods used to create the specific detail. Conforming to these general specifications and methods will maximise interoperability between the government and non-government sectors.

Broadly speaking, the areas where standards will need to be developed and agreed are:

These standards will need to be supported by items of common infrastructure, such as a component registry, which provides a library of re-usable semantic components. They will also need to be supported by a services registry, which describes services in a consistent way and points to them (but does not actually provide the services).

More details on these standards, particularly the content standards, can be found in the draft National Government Interoperability Framework (2006).

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A.3 Capability and maturity stocktake

In parallel with the development of the cross-agency SOA, a comprehensive assessment of the government’s service delivery capability and maturity will be undertaken. Capability is defined as ‘the sum of all those things that enable an organisation to deliver services’. The capability stocktake will identify opportunities and gaps to be addressed as part of the implementation of the cross-agency SOA.

The stocktake will reflect the Delivering Australian Government Services—Service Delivery Capability Model, which lists the elements of the government’s service delivery capability as:

This model provides an agreed language to describe, build and improve all those things that enable an agency to deliver efficient and effective services. It will be applied across government to ensure online service delivery is enabled by the maturity of departments’ and agencies’ capabilities.

The capability inventory will be informed by assembling an inventory of Business Plans and ICT Strategic Plans for key service delivery departments and agencies.

A.4 Pathway projects

The government will use the cross-agency SOA and the capability stocktake to identify pathway projects. This project-based approach will be more flexible, less risky and will deliver tangible results sooner than attempting a complete ‘design and build’ approach for the whole of government.

Pathway projects will be selected to drive strategic investments which fill gaps identified by the capability and maturity model. They will provide a well defined route towards the model architecture, by using selected government services and agencies to develop, implement, test and broaden key parts of the cross-agency SOA.

As far as possible, existing services and facilities will be used as the basis of pathway projects. The projects highlighted under the list of possible components of the cross‑agency SOA are therefore prime candidates for pathway projects. Other possible pathway projects include:

Each of these projects would be designed to be scaled up, in terms of adding more agencies and services, and interlinked at some stage of their development.

Contact for information on this page: estrategy@finance.gov.au

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Last Modified: 18 July, 2008