Since 1999 the Malaysian government has promoted a series of flagship technology applications, each of which has required different government ministries to establish collaborative workflows and systems. Examples of flagship applications that have required coordination between agencies include e-government, smart schools, the government multipurpose card, and telehealth. A key enabler of these initiatives has been a consensus-based approach to developing the public sector’s enterprise architecture. The Multimedia Development Corporation (MDC), a Malaysian government agency responsible for providing advice on public sector IT policies and legislation, has played a key role in this process (see p5, ‘Government enterprise architecture issuers addressed’, PSTM January 2005).
“When our government technology projects were started, MDC’s role was to come up with a blueprint,” explains Dr Muhammad Ghazie Ismail, Senior Vice President of Malaysia’s Multimedia Development Corporation. “From its initial stages we played a key role to assist and facilitate the development and implementation of the project with the lead government agencies.”
The projects were developed based on certain minimal standards to allow integration at a later stage. Integrations were initiated as and when the projects modules were ready within each application and across other flagship applications.
“As we went along we realised that the different flagship applications worked well on a standalone basis, but in order to ensure a smooth exchange of information across different flagship applications we needed to have a more lateral focus,” says Dr Ghazie.
The ‘Cross Flagship Integration (CFI)’ study in 2003 was initiated to understand and address major interoperability issues, and ensure that the flagship applications spoke the same language. The study was completed at the end of 2004 with a design called enterprise architecture. This was undertaken together with the lead government agencies. This will provide a potential platform for future integrations and implementations within the government agencies in Malaysia.
Balancing act
An issue common to all government agencies dealing with ICT is the creative tension between the attempt to coordinate across the entire public sector, and the natural inclination of individual ministries to press on with systems architectures deemed to best fit their requirements
According to Dr Ghazie the MDC has adopted a pragmatic approach to selling the benefits of pan-government coordination. On the one hand MDC has focused on the issue of effectiveness in planning, project management, and people handling – and on the other hand, it has worked to standardise the deployment, maintenance and post-implementation integration of the flagship applications.
“The lead government agencies have their own objectives, because they know their business better than we do,” he says. “So that was the reason that the enterprise architecture was co-develop with the lead government agencies”.
“I don’t think this dialogue is ever going to be easy, but if you make sure that the lead agencies see the benefits of an integrated solution in a near future, then you can get the necessary support,” continues Dr Ghazie. “An example of this is eSPKB [Electronic Budgeting Control and Planning System], a budget system which is central to all the other flagship integration. In this way such enterprise architecture brings clear value. I think it is our responsibility to do a bit more to drive buy-in from ministries. When we started integration was not a main concern, but as we rollout, it has become vital. So our role is to ensure that the benefits outweigh the obstacles.”
The road ahead
Not only is the MDC working closely with their colleagues in Malaysia’s and the related ministries, but increasingly the agency is looking into the region and beyond to learn from the experience of their international peers.
“Another area we are focusing on is how to enhance the flagship application,” Dr Ghazie reveals. “Specifically we are looking to comply with global best practices, and we have met with and seen what the Koreans are doing, we have looked to the United Kingdom for benchmarks, looked at UN recommendations. I would say that from a governance perspective we are now close to global best practices. But we have to keep looking at the external environment if we want to maintain that position.”
As Dr Ghazie points out, enterprise architecture does not belong to any individual agency, or even to any individual tier of government. True government coordination is only possible when the central, state and local arms of administration are able to interconnect.
“At the moment our flagship applications only involve federal agencies but our plan is to study the readiness of state governments to be brought within the same framework,” says Dr Ghazie. “This study will take place in the next five year plan, but we want to make sure now that the state government are able to implement and benefit from systems that have been developed at the federal level.”
Autor: James Smith
Quelle: Public Sector Technology & Management, 12.09.2005
