A Classification Taxonomy for Public Services in Iran
Fereidoon Shams Aliee
1
, Reza Bagheriasl
2
, Amir Mahjoorian
3
, Maziar Mobasheri
2
, Faezeh Hosieni
2
and Delaram Golpayegani
1
1
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
2
Information Technology Organiztion of Iran, Tehran, Iran
3
Service-Oriented Enterprise Achitecture Laboratory, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
Keywords:
Business Reference Model, Public Services, Classification, National Enterprise Architecture Framework.
Abstract:
These days public sector provides numerous services to citizens. Identifying and managing these services is
needed for establishing a national Business Reference Model (BRM). Classifying services according to their
functionality provides a great view of the current state of public services and facilitates the government policy-
making. This classification taxonomy can be considered as a part of the BRM. In this paper, we propose a
functional classification taxonomy of the Iranian public services including government-to-government (G2G),
government-to-business (G2B), and government-to-citizens (G2C) services. All of the services provided by
Iranian public agencies fit into this classification. Up to now, more than two thousand of these services are
classified.
1 INTRODUCTION
In the past few years, countries adopted Enterprise
Architecture at a national level have increased in num-
ber. In fact, National Enterprise Architecture (NEA)
has become an essential part of e-government plans as
the governments have found out the positive correla-
tion between NEA programs and e-government suc-
cess (Saha, 2009; Ojo et al., 2012).
Business Reference Model (BRM) is an important
component of most of NEA frameworks and it pro-
vides a classification taxonomy of business functions
and services (CIO Council, 2013; Australian Govern-
ment Information Management Office, 2011). From
the government perspective, BRM can have a great
impact on public sector transformation which has had
a crucial role in e-government success (Saha, 2009).
Every government provides a vast range of public
services to its citizens either in a traditional or elec-
tronic way. These services are designed and devel-
oped by different public agencies with different struc-
tures and business areas. This results in duplicated or
fragmented business services and the cross-agency in-
teroperability cannot be guaranteed (Saha, 2010). A
BRM helps the government have a holistic view of
public services which results in making informed e-
government decisions.
In Iran, the public sector is extremly complex and
dynamic. Thus, one of the biggest challenges of the
government is understanding the current state of busi-
ness processes and services. To overcome this chal-
lenge, Iran’s National Enterprise Architecture Frame-
work (INEAF), shown in Figure 1, considers a busi-
ness service reference model (Shams Aliee et al.,
2017). The national BRM is derived from FEAF
(CIO Council, 2013) and is customized in way that
the government is able to effectively manage public
services and deliver them to citizens. The most dis-
tinctive feature of the national BRM is that it does not
only classify the services according to the sector they
belong to but also it provides a classification which
categorizes public services based on their functional-
ity. Iran’s first foray to implement EA at the govern-
ment level is using this classification to comprehend
the current state of public services in order to make
new policies to achieve the future state.
In this paper, we focus on functional classification
of public services in Iran. In section 2, we have a
brief look at related work on BRM. In section 3, we
discuss that why public services should be classified
based on their functionality and what we expect to
achieve from this classification. Next, we introduce
10 categories of public services that we have identi-
fied. Section 5 provides some information about how
712
Shams Aliee, F., Bagheriasl, R., Mahjoorian, A., Mobasheri, M., Hosieni, F. and Golpayegani, D.
A Classification Taxonomy for Public Services in Iran.
DOI: 10.5220/0006789307120718
In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2018), pages 712-718
ISBN: 978-989-758-298-1
Copyright
c
 2019 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved

Figure 1: The Iran’s national EA framework (Shams Aliee et al., 2017).
we have applied this classification to Iranian public
services and we discuss the results. Finally, the con-
clusion is drawn in section 6.
2 RELATED WORK
Since business architecture is an inseparable part of
EA, having a BRM promotes collaboration and con-
sistency. BRM provides a common tool for business
architecture, which can be shared between organiza-
tions (Adams et al., 2014). In this section, we have
a brief look at the structure of BRMs in well-known
NEA frameworks.
FEAF provides a three-layer BRM that represents
classification taxonomy for describing the Federal
governments business functions and services. At the
highest level called mission sector,10 business areas
of the government are identified. The next layer de-
fines what government does by introducing 40 busi-
ness functions each of which related to a specific busi-
ness area. Ultimately, the service layer describes busi-
ness functions at a component level (CIO Council,
2013).
The Australian Government Architecture (AGA)
defines a BRM in addition to a service reference
model. The former describes government business
functions and is structured into three layers: business
areas, lines of business, and sub-functions. The latter
provides a classification taxonomy of services based
on the business they support and their performance
objectives. According to AGA, the service reference
model is also a three-layer hierarchy: service domain,
service type, and component (Australian Government
Information Management Office, 2011).
Similarly, the Korean Government Enterprise Ar-
chitecture (KGEA) considers both business and ser-
vice reference models and underlines that their com-
bination improves the government services integra-
tion and reuse (Lee et al., 2013).
The NewZealand (GEA-NZ) BRM classifies both
government products and services and government
business functions. Business domain, business area,
and business category are levels of the BRM (Deleu
and Clendon, 2015).
So far, we have reviewed the structure of BRM
in some of NEA frameworks and none of them rep-
resents a functional classification taxonomy of public
services. In the following, we will mention some pa-
pers that focused on e-government services classifica-
tion.
(Fonseca and Corr
ˆ
ea, 2014) suggests using
service patterns for modeling and developing e-
government services. In the proposed method, the
A Classification Taxonomy for Public Services in Iran
713

patterns are extracted from existing e-government ser-
vices, classified according to government areas, and
cataloged in a repository. The authors also recom-
mend a template for service pattern description. In
another work, service patterns in public healthcare are
presented and used for designing G2G enterprise ser-
vice bus (Nazih and Alaa, 2011).
3 REASONS BEHIND
FUNCTIONAL
CLASSIFICATION
Service is a well-established concept in different do-
mains of agencies and is a language being compre-
hended by both IT and business people. Service-
orientation also has a positive effect on interoper-
ability, reusability, cost, and agility (Lankhorst and
Bayens, 2009). Therefore, business service is consid-
ered as the key element in the national BRM. To initi-
ate NEA implementation, the Iranian ministry of ICT
asked a number of Iranian public agencies to provide
a catalog of their services. Each service was repre-
sented using a specific service description template.
By analyzing the catalogs, we have noticed four com-
mon errors:
• The agency provided some services that should
have been provided by another agency.
• The agency did not have a clear understanding of
service concept and counted everything it does as
a service.
• The agency has ignored a number of services that
should have provided according to its duties and
responsibilities.
• The agency has ignored some of its online ser-
vices.
These services fit into 14 mission sectors identified
in Figure 2. Although these mission sectors define
business operations of the government, they are not
sufficient for analyzing the current state of business
functions and services for delivering efficient public
services. Classifying public services based on their
functionality may help the government to deliver an
integrated and valuable set of public services. In ad-
dition, classifying public services based on their func-
tionality will expose Achilles heels of the government
in service delivery. The government can use this clas-
sification for policy-making, budget allocation, mon-
itoring agencies performance, and measuring IT im-
provement.
Figure 2: The Iranian government mission sectors.
4 FUNCTIONAL
CLASSIFICATION TAXONOMY
OF PUBLIC SERVICES
By studying a majority of the public services, we fig-
ure out that although different vocabulary is used to
describe them, they share commonalities and can be
classified into 10 categories which fit nearly all of
the government-to-government (G2G), government-
to-business (G2B), and government-to-citizens (G2C)
services. This classification is the result of combined
efforts of experts in different business areas and is
based on the constitution of the Islamic Republic of
Iran. It is worth mentioning that reviewing other gov-
ernments’ services to citizens helped us form the clas-
sification. In the following, we are going to explore
each category in-depth.
1. Establishing laws, regulations, tariffs, and stan-
dards
Description: includes a set of public services that
lead to formation and establishment of new laws, reg-
ulations, tariffs, and standards. These services are
usually provided by legislative agencies.
Type: Governance
Level: National
Examples:
• Codification of law and legislation
• Formulation of a new law
• Levy healthcare tariffs
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2. Validation and qualification assessment
Description: includes services which lead to veri-
fication of a legal or natural person and qualification
assessment of goods or services.
Type: Governance
Level: National, local
Examples:
• Issuing a trading license
• Degree approval and conferment
• Issuance of passport for refugees
3. Monitoring, auditing, and conducting trials
Description: matches the public services that
monitor compliance with laws, policies, or standards
through monitoring, auditing, and conducting trails.
Type: Governance
Level: National, local
Examples:
• Monitoring enterprise architecture laboratories
• Handling customer complaints
4. Enforcing the law
Description: includes services designed for carry-
ing out criminals sentences and imposing fines.
Type: Governance
Level: National, local
Examples:
• Imposing driving fines and penalties
• Confiscating properties
5. Registering public records
Description: consists of a set of services that en-
ables the applicant to submit information or records
in person or by electronic means.
Type: Supportive
Level: National, local
Examples:
• Issuing birth certificate
• Filing price of goods and services
• Keeping birth, marriage, and death records
6. Publishing information, statistics, and records
Description: includes services that generate re-
ports, produce statistics, and provide analysis based
on collected information. Services in this category
may also provide searchable online databases.
Type: Supportive
Level: National, local
Examples:
• Publishing census data
• Looking up birth records
7. Providing funds and benefits
Description: matches the services that provide
grants, funds, or loans to a legal or natural person.
Type: Supportive
Level: National, local
Example:
• Providing funds for university students
• Granting mortgage loans
• Providing concessional loans
8. Training and cultivating culture
Description: includes a set of services that provide
training and education for citizens. Public services in
this category are considered as a complementary for
services in other categories.
Type: Supportive
Level: National, local
Examples:
• Holding academic conferences and symposiums
• Offering online courses
9. Infrastructure investment, development, and
maintenance
Description: consists of a set of services that lead
to development and maintenance of urban, road, com-
munication, etc. infrastructures.
Type: Supportive
Level: National, local
Examples:
• Road maintenance
• Developing railway infrastructure
10. Service operator
Description: includes services that directly pro-
vide services to citizens.
Type: Direct services
Level: National, local
Examples:
• Opening a new account (Banking services)
• Providing vehicle insurance (Insurance services)
• Medical and healthcare services
5 PUBLIC SERVICES
CLASSIFICATION IN
PRACTICE
the ultimate goal of the national BRM is to make a
holistic view of public services. The public services
should be accessed and used easily by citizens regard-
less of their location or time. To achieve this, we con-
sider five steps depicted in Figure 3.
A Classification Taxonomy for Public Services in Iran
715

Figure 3: Steps to achieve a holistic view of public services.
Forming a library of public services including ser-
vice catalogs of 95 public agencies is the first step in
achieving a holistic view of public services. All of
the services delivered by an agency are presented us-
ing a predefined service description template. In the
next step, joint meetings of ICT and public agencies
are held to discuss each service in order to identify the
category it falls into. Next, the result of the previous
step is used for discovering the gap between current
and target state of business services not only in a sin-
gle agency but also in the government as a unified en-
tity. Therefore, each agency should re-engineering its
processes and services to narrow the gap and the gov-
ernment has to make new policies and standards based
on the results of the classification process. After ap-
plying the changes, services delivered to citizens. As
it is shown in Figure 4, the citizens can access the ser-
vices provided by different public agencies through a
single portal (ira, 2018b) or via a mobile application
called mobile government (ira, 2018a).
Up to now, more than two thousand public ser-
vices provided by 95 public agencies are classified.
Table 1 illustrates the result of classifying public ser-
vices according to mission sectors.
Table 2 lists the number of services that match
each category. The results show that the government
is facing a tough challenge managing public services.
A great number of services provided by different pub-
lic agencies but they belong to a limited number of
mission sectors and functional categories. For exam-
ple, almost a half of public services fall into validation
and qualification assessment category which means
that the government provides a variety of services for
people to get permission. But is it necessary to have
more than a thousand services for only giving permis-
sion? Are all of the validation and quality assessment
services being used frequently?
Table 1: Number of public services in each mission sector
in percentage.
Mission sector Percentage
Environment, agriculture, and natu-
ral resources
22%
Cultural and social affairs 11%
Health and well-being 10%
Education and research 10%
Transportation and urban develop-
ment
8%
Industries and businesses 7%
Communication and information
technology
6%
Economic affairs and finance 6%
Energy 6%
Internal affairs 5%
Social security and welfare 4%
International affairs 3%
Judiciary 2%
Security and disaster management 1%
The classification is beneficial for agencies as
well. Typically, services provided by an agency
belong to a limited number of categories as each
agency has a scope of duties and responsibilities.
for example, Communication Regulatory Authority
services fit into three classes namely: establishing
laws, regulations, tariffs, and standards, validation
and qualification assessment, and monitoring, audit-
ing, and conducting trials (rca, 2018). It shows that
services are aligned with the organization’s goals
and responsibilities. On the other hand, Ports and
Maritime Organization services belong to all cate-
gories except service operator. In this case, probably
the organization is providing some irrelevant services.
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Figure 4: Delivering public services to citizens.
Table 2: Number of public services in each category.
Category Number
of services
Establishing laws, regulations, tar-
iffs, and standards
95
Validation and qualification assess-
ment
1243
Monitoring, auditing, and conduct-
ing trials
285
Enforcing the law 14
Registering public records 104
Publishing information, statistics,
and records
130
Providing funds and benefits 224
Training and cultivating culture 192
Infrastructure investment, develop-
ment, and maintenance
73
Service operator 234
All 2594
Classifying public services reflects the current
state of the government services. It assists the govern-
ment and IT managers in making informed judgments
and decisions and facilitates management.
Future work concerns deeper analysis of public
services to gain accurate information about the cur-
rent state of the e-government. In addition, another
direction for future work includes using public service
classification in ITIL implementation as we think that
the agencies can take a great advantage of using the
classification especially in service design phase.
6 CONCLUSION
This paper introduces ten categories for classifying e-
government services in Iran as a part of the national
BRM. Using this classification is a catalyst for mon-
itoring and verification of public services. This clas-
sification does not only help us to verify the services
but also benefit public agencies. In addition, making a
decision about the appropriate level of service granu-
larity will be easier. It should be noted that our experi-
ence with classifying public service shows that at first
identifying the service category was time-consuming
but by gaining more experience this process speeds
up.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was supported by Information Technology
Organization of Iran. We thank our colleagues from
SOEA lab. We would also like to thank Mr. Jahangard
for his kind support.
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