TOWARDS A COMMON PUBLIC SERVICE INFRASTRUCTURE

FOR SWISS UNIVERSITIES

Florian Schnabel, Eva Bucherer

Institute of Media and Communication Management, University of St. Gallen

Blumenbergplatz 9, 9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland

Uwe Heck

Institute for Information and Process Management, University of Applied Sciences St. Gallen

Teufener Strasse 2, 9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland

Keywords: Service-oriented architectures, University, Web services, Event-driven architecture, e-Government, Public

services.

Abstract: Due to the Bologna Declaration and the according procedures of performance management and output

funding universities are undergoing organisational changes both within and across the universities. The need

for an appropriate organisational structure and for efficient and effective processes makes the support

through a correspondent IT essential. The IT environment of Swiss universities is currently dominated by a

high level of decentralisation and a high degree of proprietary solutions. Economies of scale through joint

development or shared services remain untapped. Also the increasingly essential integration of applications

to support either university-internal or cross-organizational processes is hindered. In this paper we propose

an approach for a comprehensive service-oriented architecture for swiss universities to overcome the current

situation and to cope with organizational and technical challenges. We further present an application

scenario revealing how Swiss universities will benefit of the proposed architecture.

1 INTRODUCTION

Just like companies in the private sector universities

are increasingly faced with a highly competitive

market. They rival for reputation and funding on

national as well as on international level. In

response, “excellence” has become the slogan of

various initiatives in the university environment. The

requirements to achieve excellence in research and

teaching are manifold. But not less important is the

factor of “operational excellence”. High

administrative efforts result from resource and

course planning, data administration, accounting of

services, and the administration of sponsorships.

The need for efficient and effective processes

makes the support through IT, also for the university

sector, essential. As a result university IT

departments are facing a lot of challenges. The

recent organisational change, caused by the Bologna

declaration (van der Wende, 2000), requires

European universities in addition to adhere

progressively to external (system) requirements,

such as the transmission of statistical data to public

authorities. In addition Bologna increases the

transparency and thus the comparability of

universities.

This work focuses on Swiss universities and how

they could face the organizational and technical

challenges. In the Swiss Campus 12 universities, 8

universities of applied sciences and 14 “universities

of teacher education” such as further university

institutions, supported by the Bund, exist (CRUS,

2008).

As a result of the federal organization, the IT

infrastructure and systems of Swiss universities is

dominated by a high level of decentralisation. Each

university produces and consumes its individual IT

services. Economies of scale through joint

development or the use of the same standard

software product remain untapped. Consequently the

potential of cost reduction through the usage of the

same standard applications and shared services is

high.

267

Schnabel F., Bucherer E. and Heck U. (2009).

TOWARDS A COMMON PUBLIC SERVICE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR SWISS UNIVERSITIES.

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Databases and Information Systems Integration, pages

267-273

DOI: 10.5220/0001861802670273

 SciTePress

Analogous to the experiences and empirical

studies of the private sector there is a high potential

for universities to decrease IT costs through the

systematic use of synergies. Universities commonly

agree about the weaknesses of current island

solutions and about the opportunities a common

service infrastructure will provide, e.g. cost

reduction as aforementioned. However the required

organizational and technical changes will not occur

spontaneously. Universities still hold on to the

federate structure, as it grants them certain

autonomy. Certain barriers such as lock-in effects

through existing structures are almost impossible to

be overcome by an individual institution resp.

university.

The way for change has to be paved and

incentives for universities have to be pointed out.

Joint effort is needed to overcome the described

barriers. Efforts have to be based on a common

architecture and understanding. Such are the

declared goals of a consortium of partners from

industry and academia that form the research project

Swiss Campus Web Services (SCWS) funded by the

CTI (Swiss Confederation’s innovation promotion

agency)

. First results of this project are presented in

the paper at hand.

The main goal of the project is to develop a

service-oriented reference architecture for the

administrative area of Swiss universities. This Swiss

Campus architecture shall enable the exploitation of

existing synergies, while taking into account the

specifics of the federal structure of the Swiss

Campus. Existing structures shall not be replaced

but included into the new architecture. Hence

universities will benefit from the harmonization and

reuse of internal processes that run similarly in

different organisations. Furthermore the complexity

of multiple point-to-point connections can be

reduced by creating a central infrastructure handling

the communication between the universities.

The standardisation of university software and

the accrual of a market for university software and

IT services shall be promoted, by enabling the IT

divisions of universities and IT companies to

provide their applications as Web Services.

The SCWS project extends the emerging e-

Government initiative in Switzerland. This initiative

comprises several governmental domains e.g. the

domain for resident registration SEDEX (SEDEX,

2008).

See acknowledgements

On a technical layer the Swiss eGovernment

initiative has jointly specified a secure

communication infrastructure based on the concept

of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), the so called

Event Bus Schweiz (Bund, 2006). Therefore the

envisaged development of a Swiss Campus

architecture (see section 3) will be in line with the

national initiative Event Bus Schweiz.

This paper evaluates how the implementation of

a service-oriented concept could promote the use of

synergies and support the integration of

heterogeneous applications across universities. It is

organised as follows. Section 1 introduces the

current situation for universities and motivates our

work. We give an insight into our research setting.

Furthermore this section presents the embedding of

our work in the emerging eGovernment landscape in

Switzerland. Section 2 then discusses the current IT

situation for Swiss universities and gives an

overview of the envisioned architecture. The

architecture is described in more detail in section 3.

Finally an application scenario is introduced in

section 4 that will reveal the benefit of our

architectural approach.

2 HOW THE SWISS CAMPUS

ARCHITECTURE WILL COPE

WITH THE CURRENT

SITUATION

To underline and clarify the present situation in the

Swiss Campus we conducted numerous workshops

during the SCWS project involving Swiss

universities. The goal of these workshops was to

gather information and to derive concrete figures

about their current IT infrastructure and systems.

Analysing the results of these workshops we figured

out both technical and organizational challenges of

the existing information technology the SCWS

project has to cope with. The following main

findings have been derived:

There is a lack of organisational support for

tasks and processes spanning different

organizational units both within and across

universities and their related organizations. From a

technical point of view the electronic integration of

the correspondent applications to support such

processes is still rudimentary.

The current IT infrastructure and IT systems of

Swiss universities do not provide the flexibility to

accommodate to changing organisational conditions.

The objective of SCWS is to provide an IT

ICEIS 2009 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

268

architecture that is flexible and agile enough

allowing for an easy adaptation to changing

organisational and legal requirements.

While most of the applications in use are still

traditional client/server systems, there is a trend

towards the establishment of web-based

applications. These web-based applications either

replace existing applications or cover functionalities

that haven’t been implemented yet.

Figure 1: Swiss Campus architecture.

There are only a few commercial software-

vendors that dominate the Swiss standard software

market for universities. A potential for the Swiss

Campus architecture is to define an open

infrastructure allowing other software vendors to

gain market share, to allow for the modularisation of

comprehensive software solutions, and to provide

these solutions as a service.

At the moment software is mainly hosted in data

centres operated by universities themselves. By

leveraging a software market and enabling the easy

composition of independent software modules

universities will be able to consume these modules

as a service. Hence the need to operate an own data

centre will become obsolete.

Since SOA and business process management

initiatives should be combined (Schulte, 2008b) the

Swiss Campus architecture has to consider the

modelling of processes and tasks as well as to

elaborate a concept for the transformation of these

models into IT services.

The SCWS project therefore proposes an

architectural approach enabling both the SCWS

application partners and external organisations to

establish a platform where they can bring in and

share services.

Figure 1 gives an overview of the envisaged

architecture. The architecture includes three main

roles of agents; Service users are universities or

university institutions. The functionality of a service

provider can be taken over by a software provider

but as well by a university offering internally

developed services to other universities. Service

provider and user communicate via a central

platform, the intermediary, that provides a service

registry and further central infrastructure services

(security, authentication, monitoring, etc.).

The Swiss Campus architecture will have to cope

with existing, heterogeneous solutions of the

universities’ IT-departments. These legacy systems

will be integrated into the service-oriented

architecture as web services. Another architectural

challenge is the implementation of the central

infrastructure functionality. Furthermore a goal of

the envisioned architecture is to create an

environment where software vendors and IT-service

providers are leveraged to create services that

decrease the universities’ IT and process costs.

3 AN ARCHITECTURE FOR

THE SWISS CAMPUS

3.1 Meeting Organisational Challenges

In order to meet the organisational requirements,

discussed in the previous section, we propose an

architectural approach for the Campus Switzerland

that extends the proposed architecture of the Swiss

e-Government initiative. This enhanced architecture

has to consider the integration of different

stakeholders like the universities’ IT departments,

markets for commercial software vendors and IT

service providers, and peer universities as well as

Swiss governmental organisations and initiatives

like SEDEX.

The planned architecture is based on the

coupling of multi-agent systems that will seamlessly

interact with each other. The multi-agent systems

represent domains containing central communication

and mediation services and standard objects that are

exchanged between the so called agents that

represent the stakeholders of one domain. Through

the lose coupling of these heterogeneous multi-agent

systems we will allow each university, institute, and

external partner to keep their proprietary

applications and infrastructure. Our approach

TOWARDS A COMMON PUBLIC SERVICE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR SWISS UNIVERSITIES

269

doesn’t necessarily mean to replace existing systems

in order to participate. This is one of the critical

success factors of our common infrastructure.

Swiss Campus

Unive r s ity Z

Institute XY Institute XZInstitute XX

University YUniversity X

Ex te rnal PartnerExternal Partner

Medium

Agent

AdapterAdapter

Ad a p t erAdapter

Adap terAdapterA dapt er

Ad a p t e r

Figure 2: Hierarchy of multi-agent systems in SCWS.

As depicted in Figure 2 the central domain is

situated on the second upper horizontal layer and

symbolizes the Swiss Campus. The above layer

comprises external domains e.g. companies

providing insurances for students or Swiss

governmental organisations. On the layer below the

Swiss Campus layer different universities are placed

that interoperate through the Swiss Campus domain.

Each university is built up of different institutional

domains. The different domains are connected by

adapters that allow for the seamless integration into

a holistic architecture.

Within the Swiss campus internet services are

provided by one central organisation. The SCWS

project considers to create one central service hub

that will be operated by the organisation currently

providing the internet services. You can think about

other approaches without a central hub to connect

Swiss universities. One example is to organise

communication in a peer-to-peer network. However

the existence of the internet service organisation and

thus the existing expertise in operating a hub and

providing services led us to the central hub approach

The hub function of the central Swiss Campus

domain allows for the loose coupling by providing a

central integration function. Furthermore it will

guarantee the availability of the message exchange

medium and provide security services.

We strongly believe that our envisaged approach

is applicable to other countries as well. Through the

loose coupling the autonomy of organisational units

will be guaranteed. However by simply defining

common rules and standards it will be possible to

make the coupling tighter.

3.2 Meeting Technical Challenges

The main technical challenge for the Swiss Campus

is the seamless integration of existing,

heterogeneous applications. We will therefore create

a central middleware medium that will allow for the

interconnection of these applications. The

applications themselves will then be connected

either directly, through adapters, or through the

coupling of the existing middleware solutions the

applications are connected to.

The basic principles for the Swiss Campus

architecture are based on best practices from service-

oriented architectures (SOA), as described in

(Arsanjani, 2004), and event-driven architectures

(EDA), as described in (Chandy, 2006). In order to

implement the described functionality of SOA and

EDA a middleware infrastructure is required that

provides special communication and mediation

services (Schulte, 2008a, Schulte, 2008b). For the

Swiss Campus we will implement an Enterprise

Service Bus (ESB) (Schmidt et al., 2005; Maurizio

et al., 2008; Papazoglou and van den Heuvel, 2007).

The required communication and mediation services

(Keen et al., 2004) will be described in more detail

later in this paper.

Furthermore we have to define standard objects

for the Swiss Campus that will be exchanged

through the event bus. These standard objects follow

both syntactical and semantic standards. An example

of such a standard object is an object containing a

student’s master data. As well we will specify a

concept for the connection of legacy applications

through adapters.

Communication and Mediation Services. One of

the challenges that the SCWS project has to cope

with is what central communication and mediation

services will be needed and where they should be

implemented. Further the service design has to be in

line with the service specification of the Event Bus

Schweiz initiative (Bund, 2006). Hence we will

guarantee that services of the ESB will be able to

seamlessly access the services of the Swiss Campus.

The services have to be divided into a group of

services that have to be implemented on the central

Swiss Campus bus and services that can be

implemented on distributed buses. The services

running on the Swiss Campus bus comprise a

directory service, an event catalogue service, a

subscription service, and security services. The

services running on the distributed buses cover

services for transformation, simulation of events,

operational services, tracing, error handling,

exception handling, validation, and routing.

Table 1 describes these services in more detail.

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Table 1: Communication and mediation services for the

Swiss Campus.

Service Functionality for the Swiss Campus

Services running on the Swiss Campus bus

Directory

service

Provide and make accessible all services

provided by Swiss universities, commercial

software vendors, and external partners.

Event

Catalogue

service

Provides a list of all events and their description

that can be operated by the Swiss Campus bus.

Sub-

scription

service

Offers the connected participants to subscribe to

the notification or reception of certain events.

Security

service

Offers standard security functionality

(authentication, authorization, event or data

encryption)

Services running on the distributed buses

Trans-

formation

service

Transforms messages or events from application-

specific formats into the common format of the

Swiss Campus and vice versa.

Simulation

service

Provides simulation functionality e.g. for sending

or receiving events.

Operat-ional

services

Provides functionalities for the analysis of log

files as well as performance and capacity

planning.

Tracing,

error/

exception

handling,

validation

service

Allows for the tracing of events and messages.

Furthermore error and exception handling as well

as validation is covered by this service providing

basic functionalities for transaction management.

Routing

service

Covers the provision of tables for addressing and

routing. The Swiss Campus bus only contains

entries for directly connected applications and

for the connected buses of other domains.

Standard Objects for the Swiss Campus. Existing

applications in Swiss universities and applications

from commercial software vendors and service

providers have to be integrated into the Swiss

Campus architecture. Therefore we will define

standard objects that will be exchanged through the

Swiss Campus bus. These standard objects are

composed of different parts containing information

about the Swiss Campus bus and specific application

scenarios in the Swiss Campus as well as the

message payload.

Adapters. In order to ensure connectivity and

interoperability of heterogeneous software systems

with the Swiss Campus bus adapter components will

be built. These adapters transform messages or

events from the external application’s proprietary

format into the commonly defined Swiss Campus

format and vice versa. Furthermore adapters allow

for the distributed implementation of services

enabling the communication via the Swiss Campus

bus. In this case adapters provide functionalities for

data transformation.

4 APPLICATION SCENARIO

The Swiss Campus architecture targets among others

the integration of existing applications in Swiss

universities and the establishment of a new market

for university-specific applications. In order to

support universities and external organisations in

connecting to the Swiss Campus architecture a

holistic methodology is developed comprising both

organisational and technical challenges. On an

organisational layer this methodology describes the

proceeding in how to define web services from

existing applications, how to model tasks and

processes, and how to define information objects

that are exchanged. From a technical perspective the

methodology will describe how to integrate end

systems and what functionalities adapters have to

implement.

In the following a small section of our

methodology will be presented in more detail. To

coherently derive IT services out of business logic is

a big challenge both within organisations and across

organisations. Different approaches exist, e.g. as

described in (Levi, 2002) or (Parnas, 1972).

Table 2 roughly describes how to proceed in

order to define appropriate services.

Table 2: Proceeding for the integration of web services.

Integration of Web Services

Step Required activity Proceeding in SCWS

Requirements

definition for Services

Capture business logic (tasks and

rocesses) of Swiss universities

Identification of

existing and missing

Services

Analysis of IT systems of

universities

Modelling of missing

services

Methodology for the transformation

of applications into services

according to the business model

Derive exact service

definition out of

service model

Adjust service model to

technological requirements, define

communication and behavioural

atterns

Describe and publish

services

Description according to the Swiss

Campus guidelines, publishing in

central Swiss Campus repository

TOWARDS A COMMON PUBLIC SERVICE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR SWISS UNIVERSITIES

271

Now we will present an application scenario that

provides an example of how the new architecture of

the Swiss Campus can be used and what benefit we

can expect from it. The goal of the application

scenario is the modelling and the implementation of

a service-oriented publication platform for scientific

results. This publication platform is based on an

existing publication platform solution in the area of

universities that is limited to university internal

usage. Furthermore the goal is to implement

personalized services and meta-services as value-

added services. An example of such a service is the

composition of the information system services with

services provided in the web. You can easily link the

publication authors with their profiles in Xing or

LinkedIn. Furthermore it will be easy to provide

services analysing the relations between authors or

citation data.

University C

Provide Service

Service User

Service Provider

Central Infrastructure Services

University A

Request Service

University B

Provide Service

Swiss Campus Bus

Message

Transformation

Message

Transformation

Message

Transformation

University C

Provide Service

Service UserService User

Service Provider

Central Infrastructure Services

University A

Request Service

University B

Provide Service

Swiss Campus Bus

Message

Transformation

Message

Transformation

Message

Transformation

Figure 3: Messages sent via the SCWS architecture.

Figure 3 above depicts an example of how the

ESB works in the context of the Swiss Campus. An

employee of University A plans to query a specific

document provided by another university. The query

message is sent from the IT system of University A

to the Swiss Campus bus (1). The message in the

source format is then transformed into the publicly

defined Swiss Campus format and forwarded to the

Swiss Campus bus (2). The transformation from the

application-specific format into the standard format

is done by an adapter. After receiving the message

the bus duplicates the query message and transfers it

to the two target universities B and C (3). Since

these two universities have their own message

format the Swiss Campus standard query message

has to be transformed again into the required target

format and finally forwarded to the university

systems (4). As before the transformation and

forwarding is done by an adapter.

5 CONCLUSIONS

This paper outlined an envisaged service-oriented

architecture for Swiss universities. We proposed an

architecture that addresses typical challenges of a

cross-organisational setting both on organisational

and on technical level. We believe a central hub to

be the right architectural design approach since the

operation of this hub is guaranteed by the Swiss

organisation providing network services for

universities. In a peer-to-peer manner there would be

more effort needed in order to guarantee availability

of and secure communication through the common

infrastructure.

Benefits of the SCWS initiative are manifold.

The concept of service-oriented architectures (SOA)

is evaluated and an architectural model for intra-

organisational communication is developed in the

area of Swiss universities. Theoretical results are

validated by concrete case studies. Furthermore

possible business models for SOA providers,

software vendors, and universities will be explored.

The SCWS development and application

partners gather beneficial experiences in the new

SOA environment. As service users they will be able

to benefit from resulting economies of scale, leading

to lesser costs for implementation, purchase, and

operation of software.

The choice of software products and its quality

augment. The collaboration between universities

will be simplified. In addition universities will be

able to act as a service provider themselves.

The use of the Swiss Campus architecture allows

universities to be part of the common architecture

while still keeping their autonomy. Nonetheless the

success of the initiative is dependent on personal and

organisational commitment. The needs for change

are present, but awareness has to be created in all

ranks.

Another challenge concerns data protection.

Currently universities prefer to store and maintain

data in local databases for security issues. We have

to provide a convincing security concept in order to

bring universities to accept data storage and

maintenance on external systems.

A comparison to architectural approaches for

universities in other countries would be helpful. We

envision to discuss our approach in scientific

ICEIS 2009 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

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communities as well in order to evaluate and further

improve the Swiss Campus architecture.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research presented in this paper results from the

project Swiss Campus Web Services. The project is

funded by the CTI under the project number: 9545.1;

2 PFES-ES. The project duration is 05/2008 to

10/2009. The following industry and university

partners are involved in the project: Fachhochschule

St.Gallen, HTW Chur, Universität St.Gallen,

Abraxas AG, Crealogix AG, SWITCH, Ecademy,

Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, Haute école de

gestion de Genève. More information on the project

can be found at: http://www.scws.ch

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