Professor, ICT for Agriculture and Rural Development, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute for Information and. Communication Technology, Near Indroda Circle, ...
SOA BASED DEVELOPMENT ORIENTATION OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS: A CASE OF WADI Harekrishna Misra1 B N Hiremath2 Abstract Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a strong orientation of user centered design (UCD) for effective conceptualization, design and development of information systems (IS) for sustainable use. In development paradigm this user orientation is quite critical since participation and collaboration of all stakeholders are absolutely essential. Various development led services are being incubated and implemented through government, non-government agencies to promote participation and collaboration of ultimate service users like rural citizens including farmers, rural entrepreneurs and sector organizations. Information systems in its various forms are also being deployed for sustainable use information and communication technologies (ICT) as an enabling tool. However, there are various challenges to formalize these technologies because of various barriers in adopting ICT. Studies show the effects of barriers including those related to social, cultural and infrastructural issues in the success of IS. SOA perspective provides a scope to discuss these dimensions and enables the designer to address these barriers while developing suitable information systems. In this paper, SOA perspectives of these barriers are discussed for their contributions to sustainability of systems. A case of wadi is discussed to appreciate various dimensions of SOA. wadi programme is aimed at holistic development of rural citizens while providing the opportunities for income generation and sustainable livelihoods. This programme is sponsored by KfW, Germany with active coordination of NABARD and BAIF. Its successful piloting has encouraged NABARD for scale up this concept at a national level. Thus the project bears relevance for analysis of the SOA dimensions. 1.0
INTRODUCTION
Information and communication technologies (ICT) have become an integral part of our lives. It has contributed effectively to manage business processes and has supported organizational processes in terms of optimizing transaction costs, coordination costs and agency costs. These dimensions of costs are quite critical to the success of development efforts being made worldwide. Millennium development goals (MDG) have also included ICT as means of development (WSIS, 2004) because of these strengths. Most of the developing countries around the world have adopted ICT oriented systems strategically to provide better, transparent and value added services to its citizens. This is being termed as “e-governance” strategies. In India there is rapid progress in implementing e-governance strategy keeping pace with the global scenario. With the national e-governance plan (NeGP), the pace of progress in setting up 1Professor, 2
IT & Systems Group, Institute of Rural Management Anand, P.Box-60, Anand-388001, Gujarat.
Professor, ICT for Agriculture and Rural Development, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute for Information and Communication Technology, Near Indroda Circle, Gandhinagar - 382 007, Gujarat.
information technology (IT) infrastructure has been accelerated (Ramarao et al., 2004). NeGP has identified various projects on “Mission Mode” for scale up nationally and have allocated funds for “Common Service Centres” (CSC) for deployment of ICT enabled services including egovernance services at the door steps of citizens (Chandrashekhar, 2006; NeGP, 2005). Besides, there are many mission mode projects like Gramin Gyan Abhiyan (GGA) as per agenda set through Mission 2007, National Rural Employment Guaranty Act (NREGA) and Ministry of Company Affairs (MCA-21) have been taken up. However, like the experiences worldwide (Heeks, 2006), the scale up exercise for e-governance has not been yielding results as expected in India (Janssen, 2005); Mishra, (2007). Various reasons including inadequate local level planning with least participation of citizens and challenging situations to spread effective infrastructure contribute to this poor adoption of e-governance services. Despite improved ICT infrastructure, Penetration of telephony and internet, Indian e-governance applications and services are below the expected levels of delivery standards. In this paper, it is posited that e-governance projects in India need to follow service oriented architecture in order to make them successful in terms of sustainability and providing appropriate services to citizens. Value chain principles need to evolve in the perspective of e-governance projects so as to encourage the actual use of services. It is argued that since Indian e-governance scenario is largely influenced by digital divides and rural development largely influences overall development of national economy, citizen services - especially value added rural services need to be augmented with SOA principles (Riley, 2003). It is argued that SOA approach for egovernance would provide the desired impetus to the strategies formulated. It is expected that SOA approach would showcase, incubate and encourage citizen participation for supporting egovernance efforts (Misra, 2009). The organization of the paper is as follows. In section two, SOA principles are presented which relevant to e-governance systems. The role of information systems is presented through a framework in section three. In section four three, SOA principles, their relevance in egovernance systems in Indian context are discussed. A scenario is built through SOA architecture to showcase the possible effect of SOA principles in order to appreciate citizen centric services taking scale-up issues into consideration. While concluding, future direction of the work is described in section four. 2.0
SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE
SOA principles draw strength from the benefits of well practiced architectures in software engineering discipline like client-server, distributed (including component object (COM)/ distributed component object (DCOM) and Object-Oriented) architecture. SOA principles work closely with applications and enterprise with 'service-orientation', 'services' and 'service-oriented solution logics' (Erl, 2008). E-governance services are mostly regarded as 'enterprise' level services since it includes various 'stakeholders' in the process. Major stakeholders are 'citizens', 'government agencies', 'communities' and 'service provisioning agencies'. SOA based models help revolutionalize enterprise environment by leveraging web services technologies. 'ITenabled service-orientation' provides the right impetus for a good architecture which can be possible through the SOA. Web-services driven SOA is fast gaining its status against traditional 'distributed architecture' environment. SOA builds on the strengths of 'application architecture'
and 'enterprise architecture' and therefore, has potential to manage e-governance projects. Application architectures have evolved in Indian states in isolation and there are a number of mission mode projects evolving for scale up. This scale up exercise entails federating the application architectures and their 'reuse'. Enterprise driven solutions are part of the mission mode projects which aim at having 'national reach' and providing distributed environment for the services to reach the citizens. Indian citizens have varied demands with strong rural-urban disparities and yet having a huge potential to have converged and unified services across the nation. This leads to an 'environment' conducive for encouraging individual 'service orientation' while providing 'standardized services' nationally. Indian villages cover large population to ignore and demands of this population vary depending on local, household and individual priorities, market conditions and national policies. In order to formulate a strategy to have SOA oriented e-governance services, it is essential to study the concept of SOA. SOA is expected to provide 'universal service identifier' in the system so that desired service can be identified 'on demand' with least transaction time, transaction cost and independent of spatial constraints. Universal service identifier is expected to coordinate with service broker with service descriptions so as to mine the desired service from the warehouse. A typical architecture is presented in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Conceptual Model of SOA (Arsanjani, (2004) The concept behind SOA describes the service orientation and relationship of various stakeholders who collaborate, orchestrate and provide services as desired. But an enterprise level SOA needs an elaborate treatment for collating all possible services with best practices, interaction among components and relationships. In order to capture the underpinnings of SOA architecture for detailed abstraction seven layers are presented and discussed in Figure 2 below.
Figure 2: Abstracted SOA (Arsanjani, (2004) Here, is suggested that each layer in SOA model, specific tasks are to be carried out with clear delivery mechanisms. Each layer should also relate to the other as per the demand of the enterprise in order to meet the overall objectives of the services rendered (Erl, 2008). In this model the most important of them are quality of service, monitoring of services and establishing security standards for citizen transactions so as to maintain trust, transparency and interoperability which major deliverables of Indian e-governance systems (Stayanaryana,2004) . 2.1. Development Perspectives Sustainable development can be achieved through a conscious effort to work through people and organizations to drive change at the local level. A fundamental building block in sustainable development is the creation of a community organization to which government can transfer important aspects of rural development responsibility. In some areas local organizations are self-initiated, while in others such organizations are organized and strengthened by NGOs. Many programs give considerable attention to the steps by which local organizations are established. Attention is also given to include marginal members of the community and to strengthening the voice of women. The goal is to build an organization that includes all those who have a stake in their own development. Once established, the community organization becomes the unit that enables villagers to contribute to development, undertake problem solving, and generate effective demand for their production, value addition and distribution. 3.0
INFORMATION SYSTEMS PERSPECTIVES OF E-GOVERNANCE
Information systems provide the strategic direction to induction of ICT enabled services. These information systems provide requisite ambience to conceptualize, design, develop and implement ICT oriented projects. It includes the organizational priorities, strategies and embeds them in the projects for a holistic approach to systems development. E-governance issues recognize the role of information systems since it aims at involvement of all stakeholders holistically for its sustainable deployment. In Indian context, the citizens impose varied challenges due to rural-urban disparities and diverse requirements. Development perspectives
discussed in section 2.1 also make the e-governance effort more complex. It is argued that each household in a typical Indian village has specific latent demand on “information”, which is based on its “livelihood security” opportunities and challenges. This latency becomes critical when the related infrastructure is not available in the proximity of a village. Meeting this demand would attract an interface with NeGP services at the household level and a sustainable synergy among related infrastructure and services. It is argued that a village information system (VIS) is important in the context of e-governance in India. A well articulated and documented VIS plan to capture the dynamic needs of the villagers is essential for such endeavors. Such VIS needs to capture the latent demand and to interface with e-governance services on a sustainable manner. A mere aggregation of household information at the village level would not perhaps raise the latent demand (Mishra and Hiremath, 2006). Program me, Policy and Schemes Capacity
Content Connectiv ity Capital
House hold livelihoods Security plan (1)
NeGP Services (Supplies )* (6)
(*interfaces with VKC, VRC and alike; C2B, B2B,B2G…)(7)
Citizen Interface (5)
Village Informati on System
Demand on Village Resource (2)
(Demand s) (4) Household IS plan (3)
Figure 3: Information Systems Perspective (Adapted from: Mishra and Hiremath, (2006); MoIT, (2009b) In Figure 3 the framework for VIS is presented with reference to SOA discussed in section 2. This framework also presents seven layers to manage the e-governance systems. Each of the seven layers is numbered and discussed with reference to Indian e-Governance SOA model. 4.0
WADI PROJECT3
Over the last two decades, Bharatiya Agro Industries Foundation’s (BAIF) work with tribal communities has thus helped to evolve a holistic approach encompassing alternate land use opportunities, development of physical resources and assets, development of the farming system, improving the quality of life through reduced drudgery, better health and women’s development, increased awareness, knowledge and management capacity which empowers the community to take up their own development further. Based on the needs of the participating tribal families, development of productive orchards of mango (Wadi) was given prominence. “Wadi” means a ‘small orchard’ covering one acre with crops like cashew, mango, amla or any 3
Adapted from the evaluation project work undertaken by the authors on behalf of NABARD funded WADI evaluation programme in the year 2007.
fruit crop suitable for a given area with forestry species on the periphery of the land holding bordered by a productive live-hedge. Table 1: SOA Perspectives of VIS Layer
Layer Description
Rationale
E-Governance (Indian Context)
1
Operational Systems
Legacy Systems, Business Intelligence of enterprise
2
Enterprise Component
3
Services
Maintain Quality of Services; Organize Service Level Agreements Business Processes, Interfaces and Orchestration
Legacy systems have evolved for e-government systems as backend services. E-governance pilot projects are emerging in isolation and there is effort to identify, design and implement National Mission mode Projects. State Data Centers, National Data Centers, Identification of Service Providers are in the agenda State level Grids, Connectivity to Citizen services and Interfaces with Citizens
4
Business Process Composition
Choreography, Business Integration
5
Access
User Interfaces
6
Integration
Intelligent interfaces, protocol mediation
Location specific contents
Services Composition, Services Composition and Choreography
7
Quality of Services
Monitor, Manage and maintain quality of service
e-governance standards at national government level, interoperability protocols
Service orchestration
Government services and business services to converge; Government and Business process Reengineering Citizen Interfaces
SOA Component Proposed Service Provisioning (Service Brokerage and Service Orchestration)
VIS Layers
Services Composition, Loosely Coupled
2 VIS should contribute to egovernance with details on demand 2,3 VIS aggregates the latent demand
Service Providers (Service Composition, Aggregation, Orchestration) Service Orchestration (Supply)
Services (Demand)
1 VIS should capture household needs and contribute to egovernance intelligence
4,5 VIS works as presentation layer for the SOA 4,5 VIS choreographs the dynamic demands 4,5,6 VIS pulls the services demanded from the egovernance service backbone through SOA 7 VIS contributes to quality through aggregation of demand on line
Discussions with the communities from different villages indicated that most families had sloping low productive lands of about one acre and that they had basic closeness with trees and forests. Their migration had also provided tribals with an exposure to the prosperity of orchard owners.
Thus, the idea of helping the tribals emerged to develop their own wastelands into productive plantations of fruit and forest trees. The program thus a stage of crystallization into a model approach which had a well defined core activity (the one-acre Wadi), a set of other well defined intervention areas (soil conservation, water resource development, supplementary livelihoods, community health, skill development, and building up peoples institutions), and a built in flexibility to detail out each of the above as relevant to the local situation. Processing facilities were established for a cluster of villages and finished products for marketing. BAIF implemented a conscious strategy of organizing, promoting and nurturing community based organizations as a core component of its livelihood enhancement strategy. Several types of people’s organizations are promoted based on the programme design, such as self help groups (SHG), village level planning committees, users groups of various goods and services, clusters and federations of SHGs, village level organizations and processing and marketing cooperatives. These organizations help in motivating the members of the community to sustain their interest and get actively involved in the various development initiatives. These organizations are also effective in procuring necessary agricultural inputs, disseminating technology, organizing post-harvest handling, processing and marketing of the produce. At the village level, it promoted women’s self help groups (SHG) each having 10 – 15 members. It also organized user groups at the village level. All user groups and SHGs were federated into a Gram Vikas Mandal (GVM) at the village level. The GVM on an average has 80 – 100 households as members. An Ayojana Samiti (AS - local planning committee) was formed with 12 – 15 members chosen from among the various user groups. In addition, at the cluster level (25 - 30 villages/cluster), a cooperative was registered with around 1800 primary members. Each household has two shares – one each for the man and wife. This layered structure helped address separate but complementary needs of the people and organization. The user groups and SHGs at the village level functioned as common interest groups. The user groups addressed the needs of wadi owners (farmers) while the SHGs exclusively focused on women and micro savings. The GVM provided a forum where all the participating households could discuss and take collective decisions. The GVM also acted as a financial intermediary, pooling savings from every household on the day of “Holi” festival and giving out loans to various member households for one-year term at a fixed interest rate of 25 percent per annum by common consent. The AS was a functional body that took day-to-day management decisions and reported back to the GVM. At the cluster level the cooperative was meant to address the needs of marketing of farm produce and also leverage the potential of value addition though agroprocessing, bulk purchase and linking to larger financial resources (Misra and Hiremath, 2007).
5.0
ANALYSIS
Table 2: Analysis of wadi Project based on SOA-VIS Principles Layer 1
Layer Description Operational Systems
VIS Components Captures latent through livelihood analysis
demand security
2
Enterprise Component
Captures village level demand on resources
3
Services
Cooperative societies, households are parts of VIS
4
Business Process Composition
Federation and Cooperatives work for value addition, negotiations and member benefits
5
Access and Presentation
6
Integration
7
Quality Services
AS, MVM, GVM work together to provide services to members, Trust is built and VIS can contribute A strong network is needed for collating information demanded for the VIS VIS needs standard operating procedures and GVM, MVM and cooperatives contribute to this area
6.0
of
Case (wadi) Wadi supports with all dimensions of livelihood security for the house hold; Process Maturity is visible. (strong for SOA) wadi provides the aggregated demand because of process maturity in estimating household demand (Strong in SOA); MVM, AS Information for input, output markets, IG opportunities are addresses through cooperatives, SHGs.(Strong in SOA), MVM,AS, Cooperatives Villagers work in tandem with cooperatives, SHGs for common goal related to information, pricing, costs and other related services on education, health, governance, (Strong in SOA); MVM, GVM, Cooperatives, Processing Centers Access point is near to village. (Strong in SOA)
Services of State Agencies and National Network do not converge (Strong in SOA) Broad based Citizen Demand is not planned and captured. (Weak in SOA)
CONCLUSION
The study of wadi through the perspectives of SOA and with an aim to have a purposeful dialogue with e-governance services provides the desired interface. The citizen interface has been one of the critical challenges for e-governance planners and implementers. Provisioning of desired services through the access points on a sustainable basis through business models has increased the complexity. It is possible to address issues related to business, process improvement and value added services through SOA principles. It is examined through this case study that wadi project has provided the necessary base for citizen trust, information generation and dissemination platform. Therefore, it is necessary to appreciate the features of SOA and implement VIS in the villages to have a constructive interface with access points of egovernance network. This is a conceptual study and in our subsequent work we have plans to include software engineering process modeling approach and develop a prototype for the VIS based on SOA principles.
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