EXTENDED GOVERNMENT

An Interoperability Point of View

Claudio Biancalana

Department of Computer Science and Automation

Artiﬁcial Intelligence Laboratory

Roma Tre University

Via Della Vasca Navale, 79, 00146 Rome, Italy

Francesco Saverio Proﬁti, Fabio Raimondi

LAit S.p.A.

Via Adelaide Bono Cairoli 68, 00145, Roma

Keywords:

Extended government, Maturity model, Interoperability, eGovernment, Knowledge management system.

Abstract:

The widespread diffusion witnessed by e-Government services in recent years, has allowed the realization

of important cases of administrative simpliﬁcation, mainly due to the direct interaction between informative

systems of administrations in A2A modality. In the above scenario, a great importance is assumed by the

concept of interoperability, intended as the set of technical rules necessary to deﬁne a common interface

between the administrations, which have the need to exchange information in A2A modality, and which allow

to protect the technological choices already in existence, and the organizational autonomy. The aim of the

present paper is to illustrate the state of the art of the project initiatives prompted by the Regione Lazio,

relatively to interoperability, with particular reference to the concept of Extended Government. Such concept

ﬁnds its foundation in the deﬁnition of Extended Enterprise. It has been massively used in project initiatives of

the Region, with the aim of reusing the scientiﬁc research results in such ﬁeld, mainly relatively to the design

and realization of Knowledge Management Systems.

1 INTRODUCTION

In the late ’90s, the concept of Virtual Enterprise (VE)

for enterprise organizational models was introduced,

where every business unit organization is connected

to each other through a data transmission network,

in order to explore market opportunities (Fabian and

Plesca, 2007) (Strader et al., 1998) (Goldman et al.,

1995) (Camarinha-Matos and Afsarmanesh, 1999)

(Sieber and Griese, 1997) (Larsen and McInerney,

2002) (Chalmeta and Grangel, 2003) and cooperate,

on a temporary basis, to better respond to business

opportunities. In other words, a Virtual Enterprise

can be seen as a heterogeneous network for both en-

terprises and individuals with integrated cooperation,

using ICT technologies and protocols for a speciﬁc

business process.

Over the years, a second model has been devel-

oped, substantially similar but based on more sta-

ble and long-term oriented agreements: this is the

Extended Enterprise (EE) (Sch

onsleben and B

uchel,

1998) (Oliveira et al., 2003) model. One of the most

critic and important aspects in the implementation of

an EE organization model is the single participant

IT assets integration, realizing inter-organization pro-

cesses (B2B) with knowledge sharing. To such aim,

in literature, several frameworks are diffused: from

SOA and EDA model for IT infrastructures integra-

tion to XML-based outlines (like RosettaNet) for B2B

processes speciﬁcations, to models implementing in-

tegrated Knowledge Management Systems (KMS). In

our opinion, an organization model similar to EE has

been also diffused to the Government level and can be

recognized in initiatives such as IDABC

, SPCoop

ICAR

, iLazio2010

. These initiatives are designed

http://ec.eurpoa.eu/idabc/

Centro Nazionale per l’Informatica nella pubblica am-

ministrazione - http://www.cnipa.gov.it/

http://www.progettoicar.it

http://www.esiig2.it/esiig2/pagina.php?cat=8

513

Biancalana C., Saverio Proﬁti F. and Raimondi F.

EXTENDED GOVERNMENT - An Interoperability Point of View.

DOI: 10.5220/0001822805130520

In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2009), page

ISBN: 978-989-8111-81-4

to realize the Administration to Administration (A2A)

and Administration to Business (A2B) processes and

are based on stable and deeply deﬁned agreements.

Unlike the EE model, however, there is no focaliza-

tion on business opportunity aspects but on a strong

guideline for the simpliﬁcation and the effectiveness

of eGovernment Services. In addition, the need to

handle and query unstructured information has re-

sulted in the gradual awareness of the need to adopt

KMS based on semantic and user-modeling functions.

This high degree of similarity allows us to introduce a

new deﬁnition to be used for reference to the concepts

described so far: we will speak about Extended Gov-

ernment (EG) as a Public Administration context-

oriented organization model of EE type. Hence, the

goals of this article are:

• more detailed deﬁnition of the concept of Ex-

tended Governement;

• description of the initiatives started up by LAit

S.p.A. and Regione Lazio in the ﬁelds of eGovern-

ment and interoperability in terms of EG model;

• description of future developments, with particu-

lar reference to the design of a KMS, whose de-

velopment is strongly based on the parallelism be-

tween EE and EG model and on deep research in

the ﬁeld of EE.

2 DEFINING EXTENDED

GOVERNMENT

We refer to Extended Government (EG) as an in-

tegrated unit of organizations, agreements, protocols

and ICT resources able to support Public Administra-

tion to deploy a context-oriented model to build Ad-

ministration to Administration (A2A) and Adminis-

tration to Business (A2B) scenarios, to simplify and to

improve the effectiveness of eGovernment Services.

By analogy with EE organization model, we can de-

ﬁne main EG model features as:

• eGovernment Service-driven cooperation: A2A

and A2B processes are always aimed at provid-

ing electronic government services to citizens and

businesses, with the goal to simplify and make

them more efﬁcient and effective;

• Complementary: Administration exchanges with

others only correct and complete data that it owns;

• Process Integration and Resource Sharing: partic-

ularly data, information and knowledge;

• Interdependence: Process Integration and Re-

source Sharing is carried out according to well-

deﬁned cooperation agreements.

In order to deploy the EG Organization Model, it

is necessary to:

• deﬁne a common Governance Model through the

Administrations of all participants;

• deﬁne Guide Lines for every single participant IT

assets integration. This problem is due to different

technologies used by every Administration and

the need to preserve both investments and Admin-

istration autonomy. For these reasons, it is neces-

sary to deﬁne a technological infrastructure that

guarantees interoperability regardless of the orga-

nizational structures and single participant legacy

systems;

• deﬁne a Maturity Model, which is a structured

collection of elements that describe certain as-

pects of maturity in an organization, for exam-

ple to provide a way to deﬁne what improvement

means for an organization.

Regarding the ﬁrst and second point, all regional

projects (see following sections) use initiatives like

IDABC, SPCOOP, Linee guida strategiche piano tri-

ennale per ICT 2009-2011 by CNIPA and ICAR as a

reference. As to the third point, we introduce a heuris-

tic Maturity Model adopted in Regione Lazio to eval-

uate maturity degree in EG model deploying.

2.1 Extended Government Maturity

Model

Extended Government Maturity Model (ExGMM)

identiﬁes 5 broad maturity/capability levels (see Fig-

ure 1):

Figure 1: Regione Lazio Extended Government Maturity

Model.

• Level 1. Planned: In this stage an IT and Gover-

nance strategic plan are deﬁned. Main criteria of

this level are: vision deﬁnition and need assess-

ment;

• Level 2. IT Integration Infrastructure Deployed:

According to the strategic plan an IT integration

infrastructure is deployed;

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514

Figure 2: Regione Lazio EG Architecture and Governance vision.

• Level 3. Institutionalized: A competence center

is enstablished with the goal to minimize the cul-

tural gap caused by the adoption of EG model and

to deﬁne all the procedures and KPIs for manage-

ment control;

• Level 4. Managed: at this level, using KPI, man-

agement can effectively control the AS-IS EG

model;

• Level 5. Optimized: KPI are evaluated for model

improving.

3 REGIONE LAZIO EG VISION

LAit S.p.A. (as ICT in-house agency of Regione

Lazio) is implementing an interoperability architec-

ture with progressive technical and organizational

complexity levels, as shown in Figure 2. Obviously,

to make the various Level Domains (Local, Regional,

National and European) homogeneous, a good tech-

nical infrastructure is a necessary requirement. So, it

is important to transpose the National and European

Standards and Guidelines in projects and activities,

through a concerted organizational and technical gov-

ernance. By limiting the analysis to a mainly techni-

cal point of view, we will speak about the state of the

art of architecture under development for the Regione

Lazio, with a bottom-up approach, starting with the

Regional Domain Level up to European Domain.

4 REGIONAL DOMAIN

In order to achieve the complete software interoper-

ability requested by CNIPA speciﬁcation, the start-

ing point is the deployment of SOA/EDA architec-

ture. The Regione Lazio solution can be detailed in

the following ﬁgure:

Figure 3: Regione Lazio EG IT infrastructure.

4.1 Porta di Dominio Regione Lazio

The ﬁrst purpose of Regione Lazio infrastructure is

to decouple external resources from heterogeneous

hardware and software within Regional Domain (such

as legacy systems). The module Porta di Dominio Re-

gione Lazio (PDD-RL) represents the only point of

access for external resources (obtained by the exter-

nals PDD) and internal ones (obtained by Regional

Systems), using Web Services consolidated technol-

ogy, and implementing shared policies for security,

logging and tracing, according to SPCOOP guidelines

issued by CNIPA (see footnote 2).

EXTENDED GOVERNMENT - An Interoperability Point of View

515

4.2 Enterprise Service Bus

Once the separation of external from internal re-

sources is completed with PDD-RL, the next step is

to make the internal domain uniform, with an en-

terprise middleware that implements standardized in-

terfaces for communication, connectivity, transforma-

tion, portability and security between various hetero-

geneous systems [11]. This is the task of the Enter-

prise Service Bus (ESB) module, which is the inte-

gration layer between existing internal IT assets of

Regione Lazio Information Systems used to publish

data for G2G and G2B processes on open standards,

particularly Web Services and WS-* standards. Using

ESB as integration layer it is possible to implement

synchronous and asynchronous integration patterns.

For this reasons, we can consider ESB as the entry

point for SOA/EDA deployment in Regione Lazio.

4.3 Services Orchestrator

Orchestration consists of composing multiple services

in order to create a new composite service. In our

architecture, this component allows Services Orches-

tration: it consists of a Workﬂow Engine that can call

and execute functions provided by the single services

published on the ESB. The Workﬂow Engine adopts

WS-BPEL standard to synchronize the interactions

among different services: Business Process Execution

Language (WS-BPEL) provides a standard way of de-

scribing business processes that are based on Web ser-

vices.

4.4 Business Activity Monitoring

The Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) module has

the responsibility to monitor, in real-time mode, all

business process by user-deﬁned Key Process Indi-

cator (KPI). The BAM module is oriented to man-

agers and business analysts, giving them useful tools

to improve decision-making and optimize processes

and e-services. This module is integrated with ESB

and Service Orchestrator and can be operated through

an user-friendly interface.

4.5 Access & Single Sign on Security

Layer

Due to the complexity of the whole system, security

side is crucial. So, the ASSO Security Layer was de-

signed to achieve single access point for Regional e-

Services and to support federated authentication re-

quest in the inter-regional domain. The layer of re-

gional security has the priority to consolidate the sys-

tem of Identity and Access Management, by making

available authentication services through various au-

thentication mechanisms (i.e. userid/password, smart

card, etc.) and through the use of protocols such as

WSS (security token X.509), SAML2.0 and XACML.

The best solution spotted on the open source initia-

tives was identiﬁed on OpenSSO, which allows the

use of open standards in open source, and ensures

maximum interoperability, also in accordance with

the speciﬁcations set by the ICAR project (see below).

4.6 SOA Competence Center

The SOA Competence Center is the focal point for

aspects of infrastructure SOA and EDA, and is the

benchmark for training to local and regional author-

ities on these issues. The competence center also

has the task to organize and implement regional e-

services within the infrastructure as well as maintain

and upgrade the infrastructure. Using the tools de-

scribed above (ESB, Service Orchestrator, BAM), the

Competence Center supports local authorities to de-

ﬁne business goals, to model business processes and

to implement e-services.

4.7 Digital Identity Service Center

The Digital Identity Service Center manages ﬂows as-

sociated with the life cycle of regional identity. Its a

reference point for the insertion, update and deletion

of digital identity and it is the organizational basis for

federated identity management.

5 INTER-REGIONAL DOMAIN

Regione Lazio is involved in ICAR project, namely

Interoperabilita’ e Cooperazione Applicativa tra le

Regioni (System for e-Enabled cooperation among

Regional, Local and National Administrations in

Italy). ICAR is present in the European database of

best practices of e-government (e-practice.eu ), and

is setting up and testing the shared technical infras-

tructure for applications cooperation among Italian

regional authorities, following the national standards

deﬁned for development of the so-called Sistema Pub-

blico di Connettivit e Cooperazione, SPCoop (Public

Connectivity and Cooperation System). ICAR intro-

duced the concept of SPCoop private network, an in-

tranet of public regional administrations that have ar-

ranged inter-PA processes for organizational reasons,

according to SPCoop guidelines.

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516

5.1 Nica

Because of the need to interconnect the various SP-

Coop Private Networks while ensuring adherence to

the SPCoop speciﬁcations also in communications

between parties belonging to different networks, a

new infrastructural element, called Nodo di Inter-

connessione per la Cooperazione Applicativa (NICA,

Core of Inter-regional Interoperability) was intro-

duced. Its features are similar to PDD-RL, making

it the single point of access for both the regional do-

main and another regional federated domain.

5.2 Federated Digital Identity

Normally, the systems for digital identity have a ter-

ritorial basis. This module overcomes identity do-

mains, whose distance can be bridged through a fed-

erated system. To achieve this result, open stan-

dard (SAML2.0) designing must be used and a refer-

ence implementation must be developed by the ICAR

project community, so that interoperability can be

tested in the digital representation of identity.

5.3 Architecture Deployment in Local

Authorities

The resulting architecture described in the previous

paragraphs raises an issue. The architecture imple-

mented at regional level can be extended to local au-

thorities to achieve full interoperability within the re-

gional domain, but it is important to identify the best

architecture of the right size. The answer is to make

the regions the reference point of local authorities and

coordination node to other Regions. To achieve this,

the most advantageous solution is the hybrid architec-

ture, which provides the use of a PDD for local au-

thorities that can manage and use it, and PDD-RL for

all other entities.

6 NATIONAL DOMAIN

At national level, the CNIPA issued a set of technical

documents as a reference for infrastructural e-service

development (SPCoop). These documents were writ-

ten by 120 peoples from various local and central

administration authorities, and represent Italian ref-

erence for all interoperability plans and projects.

A signiﬁcant example is the ICAR project, devel-

oped by CNIPA under the second phase of Italian e-

Government, which will represent the engine of con-

vergence of regional projects of cooperation imple-

menting SPCoop. This way, the systems approach

adopted will allow a uniﬁed and integrated back ofﬁce

central and local government while preserving auton-

omy,. Even on the basis of the experience and the

results of SPCoop, on February 2008 CNIPA issued

strategic lines for the period 2008-2011, providing

lines of action for the development of ICT in public

administrations. The document is the result of consul-

tation with the regions and local authorities, with ref-

erence to European framework. Among the macro ob-

jectives of e-government to improve PA performance,

interesting lines of action are the two below:

• Implementation of solutions for interoperability

and integration between databases and services;

• Adoption of Knowledge Management Systems

(KMS).

Regarding the ﬁrst point, the SPCoop together

with the standardization of interchange content and

the cooperation domains, constitute a basic infrastruc-

ture for the integration of databases and government

services. To achieve this, catalogues of databases

owned by administrations should be published, in-

cluding descriptions of data and services, uniform and

comprehensive, based on ontology, deﬁned rules for

shared reciprocal access administrations. The inte-

gration and interoperability should not involve only

information resources and information Public Central

government, but also those of local authorities, with a

multilevel governance. These national guidelines are

covered by Regional projects. Regarding the second

point, improving performance necessarily requires a

new and different way of working to provide fast and

effective answers to the new problems of society, in-

creasingly complex and rapidly evolving. We must

develop the capacity to involve all relevant actors in

this issue, to activate the right channels of commu-

nication, to acquire the necessary information to the

analysis of large quantities of unstructured documents

and stimulate the contribution and creativity of com-

munities of experts. To support this new way of work-

ing, the government should gradually adopt Knowl-

edge Management Systems (KMS) of new genera-

tion.

7 EUROPEAN DOMAIN

As described above, the Regione Lazio Infrastructure

has characteristics of ﬂexibility, scalability and inter-

operability and uses open standards. This is important

in the medium and long term because the whole sys-

tem must progressively enter a European context that

is becoming more and more relevant. In particular,

the development of the Regione Lazio solution is safe

EXTENDED GOVERNMENT - An Interoperability Point of View

517

and aligned with European Interoperability Frame-

work (EIF) recommendations. This reference docu-

ment on interoperability for the IDABC programme

draws primarily the concepts of technical, organiza-

tional and semantics interoperability.

8 ROAD MAP TO EG MODEL

The architecture support to Extended Government de-

scribed so far is being issued in accordance with an

incremental plan. PDD in particular has already been

issued in production, while all other components are

being deploed. To give an indication about roadmap

progress in terms of Extended Maturity Model Gov-

ernment we can say that Lazio Region is located at

Level 2 of the MM.

8.1 CO System experience

Regione Lazio is committed in a national project

called Comunicazioni Obbligatorie (CO) that con-

nects Central Administrations, Regions and Provinces

by a net with the goal to replace the old modes used by

public and private employers to communicate hirings,

modiﬁcations and ends of job relationships to Cen-

tri per lImpiego (CPI), Enti Previdenziali and Minis-

tero del Lavoro (MIL). All services required for the

project were developed according to SPCOOP guide-

lines, with particular reference to the use of PDD

as WS Gateway. Regione Lazio participated in the

CO System using its PDD. In the ﬁrst ﬁve months,

1.570.570 service requests reached PDD-RL, as sum-

marized in Figure 4.

8.2 Lesson Learned

Regione Lazio experience raises an issue: realization

of A2A and A2B isolated processes leads to frag-

mented knowledge and to a loss of fundamental in-

formation used to integrate management relationship

between Administration and citizens or enterprises.

For this reason, LAit S.p.A. and Regione Lazio have

planned a KMS design with basic concepts (see Sec-

tion below) inspired both to EE model and EG model,

in order to devolop research ideas in the EE ﬁeld.

9 FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

Industrial and research worlds are thus sharing the

same views and aims, colliding towards a new web

vision, where knowledge is no more a huge amount

of (semi)structured text but is turning into a cloud

of overlapping concepts, topics and domains. At the

same time, a better organization of the huge amount

of information erupting from the stream of available

technologies is needed. To ﬁnd the way through

the plethora of information sources, differentiating

in content, presentation and accessibility, a viable

approach would be necessary to make these layers

explicit, allowing users to recognize them as sev-

eral possible manifestations of the same knowledge,

and organize them accordingly. It makes sense to

move from single (and ininteroperable) speciﬁc ser-

vices (blogs, wikis, forums, discussion groups and so

on) to huge collectors of information on a open and

global scale. Knowledge Management Systems fu-

ture (KMS, from now on) should provide the main

intellectual stream of interests around which knowl-

edge should be organized (and different services be

offered). By adopting Semantic Web standards, KMS

would be developed around ontological repositories

of conceptual knowledge, which will be used as ref-

erence vocabularies for accessing contents of feder-

ated (or simply annexed) services and (socially) book-

marked web pages. In this scenario, traditional ser-

vices will still be reusable and will coexist with their

new semantic counterparts, with the former being se-

mantically annotated with respect to the ontologies

adopted, and the latter natively supporting a seman-

tic organization of their content.

The main principles of KMS should be:

• Affordable setup: no more heavy bulked Social

Networks held by major company titans. As a

normal web user can now start a forum or a blog

using third party (often free) software, he should

also be able to use a web host or a hosting service;

• Accessible by (Semantic?) Search Engines: in our

vision, this is surely something related to the open

nature of KMS, but it would gain some commit-

ment from search engines, which will be able to

improve quality of searches through proper index-

ing of published semantic annotations;

• Scalable open architecture: a given service may

explicitly be built upon a KMS, committing to its

ontologies and content organization. Viceversa,

in an even more open view, independent services

may be linked by a given KMS. This would allow

users to tag the content of these services accord-

ing to the oasis reference ontologies, thus easily

putting traditional (non semantic-driven) services

immediately into practice. The same would be ap-

plied to standard web pages. People could write

web pages directly connected to a KMS making

explicit reference to its vocabulary, as embedded

RDFa, or they could semantically bookmark an

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518

Figure 4: First ﬁve months CO System service requests.

external web page (or annotate part of its content)

against that same vocabulary.

One of the biggest (and most discussed) problems

in the realization of the Semantic Web was the difﬁ-

culty in establishing consensus on domain represen-

tations. The major concern was about the natural

resistance of companies and providers to commit to

any kind of knowledge organization which could not

reﬂect their inner nature and characteristics or sim-

ply properly address their speciﬁc information needs.

Also, the different cultures which must be considered

on a World Wide scale needed to be kept into ac-

count, creating another obstacle towards ontologies

seen as acceptable shared reference vocabularies in

the Semantic Web. These fears, appear, at least in

part, as dictated by and old fashioned way of thinking

about knowledge organization. Most widely adopted

ontologies contain now very simple descriptions of

very speciﬁc aspects of a domain (or of reality, in

general). These ontologies can be easily imported

in any more complex knowledge organization system,

with no fear of generating unsolvable inconsistencies,

while leaving the possibility of providing ad-hoc do-

main descriptions for addressing speciﬁc needs, by

adding arbitrary concepts and relationships to the im-

ported ones. This approach guarantees a desirable de-

gree of shareability of the collected data (at least, on

its higher-level descriptive units) while preserving the

intellectual independence in modeling speciﬁc sce-

narios and domains. Following this approach, KMS,

while allowing for ad-hoc ontologies developed for

their speciﬁc needs, should foster reuse of standard

ontologies, thus opening to external linkable services

which have been developed independently from their

suggested vocabulary, as well as enabling peer-to-

peering.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank the reviwers for their many helpful com-

ments. We also thank Alessandra Poggiani, Simone

Ursini, Giovanni Funaro and all LAit S.p.A. col-

leagues.

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