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eGovernment

 

Vision

The e-Government Initiative commenced in January 2007.  Our goal is to provide research leadership and coordination through a major project of national benefit.  This initiative combines research from key discipline areas such as software engineering, information systems, and knowledge management.  e-Government brings together ICT expertise from NICTA, Australian universities, government agencies, private companies, and other research organisations to address the needs of the Australian and State governments in their e-Government endeavours

 eGovTeam2009_1

Focus

Innovation can be applied to many areas of electronically-enabled service provision and delivery. NICTA's e-Government research is directed at the business processes and IT systems of government agencies that support the delivery of information and services to citizens, industry, and to other areas of government.

Outcomes

NICTA's targeted research in key areas of government service delivery is creating new technologies to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, agility, and responsiveness of agencies' business processes and IT systems. The value of these efficiency and effectiveness improvements extends beyond the e-enabled agencies, and delivers social and economic benefits to a wider community of other government portfolios and jurisdictions, to private citizens, and to corporate users and customers of government

Approach

The e-Government Initiative uses an empirical approach to research and technology development that is based on:

  • Understanding the business needs of government agencies and the ICT companies who work with them to deliver information and services to citizens and industry
  • Identifying, developing, and deploying innovative software infrastructure solutions which directly address these business needs
  • Collaborating with federal and state agencies to empirically validate and refine the solution technologies through repeated field trials of prototype technologies on live projects and production systems in government
  • Delivering impact through direct use and commercialisation.  After NICTA technologies have been validated, refined, and demonstrated measurable business value to collaborating agencies, selected technologies are prepared for commercialisation so they can be delivered to a wider market through NICTA's commercial partners.

Business Needs in Government

Some typical and recurring problems found in the business processes and IT systems of many federal and state government agencies are Business-IT (mis)alignment and interoperability difficulties across organisational boundaries.  Many agencies are subject to frequent changes in government policy which entails re-planning of strategy.  The re-engineering of business processes to deliver new or amended services requires considerable time and effort, and the implementation of new or modified application programs and computing infrastructure can be so complex, time consuming, and costly that it can barely catch-up before the next major change in policy is announced. The often stove-piped or siloed nature of the constituent Divisions in a large portfolio is a further impediment to change and excacerbates the problem even further.

NICTA's e-Government effort is directed at the creation of new technologies which can be used in large programs and projects of IT-enabled business transformation which seek to replace existing processes and systems with more agile, maintainable, and responsive business enterprise architectures.

Research and Technology Areas

The e-Government Initiative is conducting research and technology development across a range of areas.

Software Architectures and Planning: Methods and tools to support policy and service delivery agencies in project-level and enterprise-level planning, design, and implementation, includes:

  • Development of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA's)
  • Architecture performance assessment and capacity planning
  • Integration and interoperability of SOA with legacy systems
  • Cost and effort estimation of major re-architecting projects

Examples of technology in these areas we have developed include the Performance Assessment of Service Archiectures (ePASA) and the Service Migration Assessment technology - Australia (SMAT-AUS).

Business Process Transformation: Methods and tools to manage business processes in government, for both individual agencies and from a whole-of-government perspective.

  • Standard business process models and implementations
  • Frameworks for cross-agency interoperability

Data Capture and Management: specialised versions of NICTA's data and knowledge management technologies are being applied to typical applications in government.

  • Sensors, middleware, decision support for environmental management
  • Document analysis tools for classification and entity identification

Collaborative Research Projects

The e-Government Initiative undertakes trials of innovative technologies with collaborating government agencies as a key mechanism for realising the benefits of ICT research in the practice of government.

Key projects and collaborators include:

  • eTax (2006)
  • Department of Industry, Tourism, and Resources - VANguard project (2007)
  • Department of Health and Ageing (2008)
  • Australian Research Council (2008)
  • IP Australia (2008)

e-Government Network

The e-Government Initiative has fostered an extensive network of individuals and organisations who have an interest in the business needs of government. This collaboration community has a diverse collection of participants including government agency executives, IT consultants, large system integrators, major software vendors, local SMEs, academics, representatives of professional societies and other peak bodies. The collaboration community is a valuable source of use-inspiration for NICTA's fundamental research, and an important input to our understanding of business neeeds and market opportunities.

The e-Government Initiative has delivered a comprehensive program of seminars, workshops, visiting research presentations, training courses, and work in progress reports to promote greater awareness of the contribution that ICT research can make to e-Government. NICTA researchers are frequently invited to present at industry conferences and innovation forums.

International Linkages

Connections have been made with many research organisations in USA, Japan, Germany, Netherlands, and Singapore who undertake related empirical software engineering research. NICTA has received visiting researchers from several international groups whose research interests are aligned with NICTA's e-Government activities.

Commercialisation

The e-Government Initiative is currently developing several technologies of different stages of maturity. We have early-stage, prototype technologies undergoing validation and refinement in collaborative research engagements, whereas other mature technologies have repeatedly demonstrated measurable business value to our collaborating agencies and are being prepared for commercialisation (ePASA). For the mature technologies, there are opportunities for IT companies to engage with NICTA as a commercial partner in the development and delivery of these technologies to local and international markets.

Further Information

News and Events


July 2009

WICSA 2009 BoF "Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Software Architecture".

December 2008

August 2008

July 2008

March 2008

January 2008

December 2007

November 2007

October 2007

May/June 2007

May 2007

March 2007

  • eGovernment project in the Canberra times: "Cash injection for e-lab", Canberra Times, 12/3/2007, Page 15, Computer Section
  • eGovernment project in The Age: "NICTA gears up: FEDERALLY funded researchers at NICTA are gearing up for several new e-government related projects", The Age, 06/03/2007

February 2007

Publications

  • Paul Brebner, Liam O'Brien, Jon Gray, Performance Modelling for Service Oriented Architectures, 30th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2008, May 10-18, Leipzig, Germany, 2008 (PDF)
  • Liam O'Brien, Paul Brebner, Jon Gray, Business Transformation to SOA: Aspects of the Migration and Performance and QoS Issues, 2nd International Workshop on Systems Development in SOA Environments, SDSOA 2008, May 11, 2008 at ICSE 2008
  • Paul Brebner, Liam O'Brien, Jon Gray, Performance Modelling for e-Government Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), 19th Australian Software Engineering Conference. ASWEC 2008, 25-29 March 2008, Perth, Australia
  • Liam O’Brien, A Framework for Scope Cost and Effort Estimation for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Projects, submitted to ICSOC 2008

Contacts

For more information about NICTA's eGovernment activities please contact:

Jon Gray
Phone: +61 (0) 2 6267 6275
Mobile: 0438 223056
Email: jon.gray@nicta.com.au

Resources

Links