A Modular Open-Source Architecture for ICT Services in the Public Administration* Marco Di Natale, Tommaso Cucinotta, and Shiva Kolachalam Scuola Superiore S. Anna Pisa, Italy {marco,cucinotta}@sssup.it
[email protected]
Abstract. This paper presents the efforts undertaken by the Scuola Sant’Anna in developing an open framework for document and workflow management within Public Administrations (PA). Goals of the project are engaging emerging and innovative technologies, interoperability standards and open architectures in the context of PA information systems, and providing a set of software components adhering to national laws. These tools constitute a basic lattice for providing advanced ICT services to the citizens and enterprises, and among PA themselves, making a step towards realization of e-Government principles. Further goals of the project are driving an experimentation of innovative opensource solutions within real case studies.
1 Introduction Public services consist of a definite set of complex legally governed processes, wherein every single unit maintains its own set of data and information. Procurement/exchange of data from/among different units on a pre-agreed format is of outmost importance as it is a crucial key for realizing smooth integration of services. Further, for achieving e-Government goals, there should be capability for any agency to join with another electronically using known and agreed approaches and standards. The need for a better coordination of efforts and investments in the area of information systems for the public administration pushed the Italian Parliament in 1993 to create the Authority for Information Technology in the Public Administration (AIPA). The aim was promoting technological progress by defining criteria for planning, implementation, management and maintenance of information systems through their standardization, interconnection and integration. The main objectives were: better services, less cost, better communication, and a wider support to the decision process. From inception, AIPA’s objectives were mainly on the technical side (standards, rules and recommendations), but there was a firm understanding that ICT technologies are no silver bullet for solving all problems, but facing and solving organizational problems is key. This requires a careful analysis of the organization and its processes, modeling the processes and evaluating them by simulation or *
This work is partly supported by the EU ASWAD project and by the MIUR project Link
R. Traunmüller (Ed.): EGOV 2003, LNCS 2739, pp. 167–172, 2003. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003
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prototyping of ICT solutions. Reuse of experiences (rather than just technology) was ultimately seen as one of the key factors for improving the quality of the processes of the PA. Starting from 1990, the Italian Government issued new laws to regulate the procedures and the technologies to be adopted by the public administration for document management, electronic registry and digital signatures. If exchange of experiences and solutions is the key factor for easing the adoption of new technologies, then open systems and their interaction by means of open standards are, from a technical standpoint, the enabling factors for such exchanges. In this view an open approach promises high levels of interoperability and availability of public data and information, allowing government agencies to operate more efficiently and cost-effectively. The adoption of open source software and open standards allows for an increased flexibility, as the source code of the software is available for customizations, maximizing reusability of software and being free from the vendor’s lock-in of closed solutions. In fact, the EC has been focusing attention on the same issue for years, as witnessed by the document produced by the Working Group on Libre Software in April 2000 [1]. Scuola Sant’Anna and AIPA spent a significant effort in order to test a new approach to PA innovation through ICT based on the open source paradigm. The outcome is a very flexible system, entirely composed of open source components, cooperating by means of open standards. This paper presents the result: an open framework for document and workflow management within Public Administrations (PA). The project follows an open and modular approach, where generic ICT components, interact with end-user applications in order to implement PA services, and exchange of data takes place by means of open standards. We adopted an Open source (OS) development paradigm that assures maximum software reusability and maximum freedom of customizing software. There are many projects on open-source software for the PA and many others (not necessarily open-source) dealing with infrastructures for e-government [2, 3, 4, 5] or focusing on specific PA needs, like interoperability [6]. Some of these are cited in the referenced papers and many others possibly exist. Yet, as far as we know, no other project exists for a framework integrating modular open source components including document and workflow management and supporting PA processes.
2 The Electronic Registry System Since 1993, AIPA has been studying various issues in adoption of ICTs within PA processes. Specific sets of these studies have focused on Electronic Registry Systems (ERS). Such systems allow to track the information flow that crosses PA boundaries, by means of recording the exact time at which a document arrives to or leaves from a PA, along with additional meta-information regarding, for example, the event, the sender or recipient of the document and the subject. This functionality was seen as a fundamental step for achieving the goal of making PA services transparent to the citizens, since the registry system is typically the interface between the PA and its customers. Furthermore, the unique registration number assigned to the documents upon registration can be used to track the document processing inside the workflow of the administration. In many PAs there was a trend to create a new registry office each
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time an information flow (or workflow) crossed the administration boundaries at some different physical point. The fragmentation of the registry offices became redundant as soon as the registry information was moved from paper to an electronic registry, which could be accessed from any location. PAs are now encouraged to merge the registry offices pertaining to a homogeneous organizational area (AOO). AIPA soon realized that most public administrations exchange documents in paper format in spite of the ICT tools for ERS and document management they purchase. The use of an electronic format for interoperability had not been possible for at least two reasons: electronic documents and e-mail messages had no legal value, and there was no standard format for electronic interchange since most PA used proprietary software tools with little or no support for open standards. The legal issues were settled in 1997 by defining digital signatures compliant with the law [7] and by conceding them the same legal value that handwritten signatures have. The standardization issue was solved by enforcing the adoption of ERS systems within the year 2004 and by issuing a technical standard [8], which provides a specification for XML-based ERS interoperability messages.
3 Towards an Integrated Framework for One-Stop Government The improvement and automation of registry offices operations by means of interoperable ERS systems is the starting point towards the goal of one-stop egovernment [4], where other services beyond the registry are available to the users. ,Q WH UR S H UD ELOLW\
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Among those services, document management and workflow management should be deployed whenever allowed by the size and/or the organizational structure of the PA, allowing for greater efficiency, transparency and security of the processes. As pointed out by several works [2, 3], process modeling and automation is recommended only when the process is stable, the complexity of the processes and the potential for improvement are significant (to justify the adoption of complex and costly technology) and a large number of instances exist for each process. Last two limitations can be ameliorated by the use of open standards and free software and by
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recent innovations in workflow management tools, which allow for a greater flexibility (even at run-time) in the definition and modification of the process models.
4 Reference Architecture Model and Development Framework The AIPA reference architecture (implemented by our framework) aims at providing the best possible support for the technologies that enable a One Stop e-Government paradigm. This means providing standard functionality, such as: registry, workflow management, document management and digital signature in a modular fashion and also providing interoperability standards. Services are subdivided into three classes [9]: • Base IT services, like e-mail, DBMS, OS services and standard web services • Certification services, like electronic registry and digital signature services • Vertical services, which provide typical functionality to manage administration data and information, i.e. document warehouse. Our architecture contains a large subset of the base services and applications. In particular, we aim at a system containing all the Base IT services, all certification services, and a transactional WF engine integrated with a document management system. Our reference implementation is based on a client-server, web-based, modular architecture and has the typical multi-tier structure of such systems, including: a database management system (DBMS); an application server, with its object Resource Broker (ORB) and support for interoperability standards (HTTP-HTTPS, CGI, SOAP/XML and others); the business logic part of the application and, finally, the presentation layer. The implementation of the base IT services required little effort, since most of the components were already available from open source projects such as the Linux OS, the PostgreSQL DBMS, the Apache web server and the Zope application server. The other components, (certification, vertical services and document management services) did not have an immediately available open source solution satisfying all the requisites for modularity and support of open standards. Therefore, they were developed on purpose or obtained as the result of joint projects with AIPA or local enterprises working on open-source projects. The implemented modules are: • Workflow Services: provided by OpenFlow, an entity-based Workflow Management System; • Registry Services: implemented by PAFlow: our Electronic Registry System; • Document Management Services: obtained by extending the Content Management Framework (CMF) Zope product in our custom CMFGeDOC Document Management tool. • Digital Signature Services: obtained by integrating a commercial smart-card based digital signature package with our Registry and Document Management systems. Integration required the development of an extended ActiveX control suitable for on-the-fly digital signatures, and the definition of reusable subworkflows implementing the process of digitally signing documents.
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Workflow Management System: Openflow OpenFlow1 has been developed according to the Workflow Reference Model by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) [10]. The system consists of the following components: • a Workflow Process Definition (WPD) tool, which allows defining all the activities which constitute a process and the transitions between them; • a Workflow engine, which is responsible for generating instances of processes, creating and managing the user worklist, invoking the proper application for each activity, managing the workflow instances; • a Workflow monitor, which allows to control the processes through their static structure and also allows to extract all the relevant statistics of the process; and • a Workflow API, modeled on the WfMC interoperability standards [10]. OpenFlow features advanced functionality such as the support for the definition of subflows and the capability of dynamic reconfiguration of the processes. Registry System: PAFlow The PAFlow project2 began as a test bed for experimenting the technical standards for the interoperability of ERS systems as issued by AIPA in 1999 and acted as a reference implementation to other PAs and software companies. The ERS system has been developed as a python application running on the application server. The ERS Server consists of several components: • Registry Entries Management Module, interfacing with the relational DB backend • Session Management Module • Access Control Module, handling role, user and permission information and the repository of the organization • User Interface Module, responsible for the web-based interaction with the users • API Module, exporting a set of methods towards external application programs. • Interoperability Module, implementing the s-MIME and XML based standards for interoperability of ERS systems, and • Workflow interface module, that allows routing the document to the selected assignment workflow activity after registration and classification. Document Management: CMFGeDOC A document management system or DMS is used to store documents in an electronic format allowing for a more efficient management (storage, searching and indexing) of document data. Furthermore, by allowing digital signature on electronic documents, a DMS system becomes the necessary condition for achieving a “paperless” administration. We found that no available open source project could satisfy our requirements, but a neighboring family of products, the content management frameworks or CMF had very interesting representatives, offering a large subset of these functionality. Among those, we selected CMF-Zope, a general purpose content management framework. 1 2
developed and currently being maintained by Icube s.r.l. The project’s URL is: http://www.paflow.it
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The CMF product offers document indexing and classification, extended access control and fast document storage/retrieval including full-text indexing for most formats. Furthermore, CMF also includes an entity-based workflow management system, which allows defining a workflow and applying it to a class of documents. However, it lacks support for some fundamental features, such as the capability of handling optical storage of documents, support for high-speed scanners and support for digital signatures. These requirements have been addressed in the design and development of our extensions in the Zope CMF-derived CMFGeDOC project.
5 Conclusions The paper presents a project for an integrated infrastructure of IT services, developed in the context of national and European projects at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa (Italy). The infrastructure is built around open source components cooperating by means of open standards. The project started from a cooperation with AIPA, a governmental agency dictating guidelines for ICT tools to be adopted by the PA agencies and offices. The overall open source framework is now completed and undergoing experimentation. It consists of the ERS system, a workflow engine (OpenFlow), and a document management system integrated with a law compliant, digital signature software. We would like to thank AIPA, Luigi Palopoli, Antonio Massari and Icube s.r.l. for the roles they played in the context of the project.
References 1.
Working group on Libre Software: “Free Software / Open Source Information Society Opportunities for Europe ?”, April 2000. 2. M. Wimmer and J. Krenner, “An Integrated Online One-Stop Government Platform: The eGOV Project”, In Hofer, Chroust, IDIMT-2001, 9th Interdisciplinary Information Management Talks Proceedings, Schriftenreihe Informatik, Universitätsverlag Trauner, Linz, pp. 329–337. 3. L.R. Jones, “Symposium on Public Management Reform and E-Government, International Public Management Review”, Volume-2 Issue-1, 2001, pp. 01–27. 4. Thomas F. Gordon, “E-Government – Introduction”, ERCIM News No.48, January 2002. 5. Lenk, K., Traunmüller R. 2000. Perspectives on Electronic Government. In Galindo, Quirchmayr (eds.). Advances in Electronic Government. Proceedings of the Working Conference of the IFIP WG 8.5 in Zaragoza. 6. Gagliardi R. and Fiorenzani P., Managing the Interaction between Citizens and Public Administrations: the One-Stop-Shop Model. ERCIM News No.48, January 2002 7. (Italian Law) Art.15, comma 2, Legge 15/03/1997, n. 59 8. Circolare AIPA n.CR/28/2000: “[…] Standard, modalità di trasmissione, formato e definizioni dei tipi di informazioni minime ed accessorie comunemente scambiate tra le pubbliche amministrazioni e associate ai documenti protocollati”, May 7, 2001. 9. AIPA: “Linee guida alla realizzazione dei sistemi di protocollo informatico e gestione dei flussi documentali nelle pubbliche amministrazioni (GEDOC 2)”, September 2000. 10. Workflow Management Coalition: Reference Model and Interoperability Abstract Specifications WFMC-TC-1012, May 2000, available at http://www.wfmc.org.
