Tech Building Blocks

Continued from page: 1

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Q&A: Architecture

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Ashish Khushu: General Manager, Strategic Bussiness,  Sun Microsystems

Technology changes fast, and having changed, changes yet again. Governance, and governments will not be able to afford to change their implementations with every change in technology. So, how do you ensure sustenance of an e-governance project from the technology point of view? Ashish Khushu, General Manager, Strategic Bussiness at Sun Microsystems provides a few guide lines. 

What is required to be done to ensure the long term sustenance of an e-governance initiative?
To ensure the long term sustenance of an e-governance project there are a couple of imperatives that should be considered at the stage of conceptualising of the project. The design and architecture of the application should ensure that the e-governance initiative allows integration of various services, built by different agencies to be integratable and interoperable over time. A modular approach is a must since it allows flexibility for reuse, replication and changes to functionalities. Integration, additions and modifications of services being offered should not be technology dependent or limited by the technologies used. Given the rapid changes in technologies, the deployment infrastructure should not be hostage to these changes in order to minimize investment and disruption.

Given that a governance structure has to sustain over many years,and that technology and tech platforms change every couple of years, how would you recommend that an e-governance implementer attempt to create a sustainable initiative?
Most of the government worldwide have taken steps to address some of these issues. The fact that services being offered outlast by years the technology used and that investment in upgradation of the delivery infrastructure is more a function of technology changes than actual requirement has resulted in government looking at this aspect.

So there are learnings in the experience of some of these countries like focusing on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and not on products. A lot more attention is now being given to the technologies being used for application development rather than the platform on which it will be deployed, and also in ensuring that the services being built are inclusive of all technologies for access and independent of the stress on deployment.

SLAs and access through multiple channels drive the deployment strategy.
This approach is evolutionary and not a one time policy decision. A good starting point is to lay down some of these key criteria as a minimum criterion for any government funded project and then leave the choice of the appropriate products to the implementer.

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