Case Study - eGIF for the Emirate of Abu Dhabi

Project Background and Scope

Boynings Consulting was invited to join Logicom in a bid to develop an eGovernment Interoperability Framework (eGIF) including associated policies and standards for a Middle Eastern government. Boynings Consulting’s role was to lead the technical team and develop the majority of the technical outputs.

Over the last few years, the government has undertaken significant effort to improve the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of its services. As part of this effort, and in accordance with applicable worldwide best practices, it is fostering and encouraging the deployment of online services. For these services to be effective, government entities need to cooperate and their IT systems need to interoperate.

The objectives of the project were to:

• put in place a framework and set policies and standards to ensure that government systems are interoperable and can exchange information with minimal human intervention;
• facilitate consistent and seamless interchange of data and information between all government entities;
• define a governance model to ensure a consistent approach to maintaining, operating and updating the developed eGIF;
• develop communication concepts to help introduce the eGIF to various government entities;
• provide a single point for the public and vendors to access the latest information.

Logicom led an international consortium bid for this project, supported by Boynings Consulting from the UK, and was appointed to conduct the project over a 20 week period.

Project Description

The project was conducted in five phases.

In phase 0, the project plan was developed, five government entities were selected to participate in the initial eGIF development , and these entities were briefed on the aims and benefits of the project and the activities expected of them.

In phase 1, structured interviews were conducted with the government entities. These interviews were designed to find the current status of the entities. In particular:

• what standards were currently being used
• what data was held that could be made available to other parts of government to help with the online delivery of services
• what data was required from other entities to provide the services planned.

This allowed us to baseline the current status of each entity.

Phase 2 was conducted in parallel to phase 1, and was designed to establish international best practice. This involved a brief review of a large number of eGIFs from around the world to see which were strongest in each of the aspects to be covered by the eGIF being developed. For each aspect, the strongest eGIFs were studied in greater detail to see what lessons could be learnt. Some aspects of the proposed eGIF, specifically in the areas of metadata, taxonomies and thesauri, were found to be covered well in documents and projects other than eGIFs, so these were also examined. The end result of phases 1 and 2 was to provide a sound foundation of knowledge of international best practice and current local practice on which to build the later deliverables.

In phase 3, we developed the main aspects of the eGIF with a bi-lingual web portal to host the various deliverables.

In phase 4, we developed the governance regime and briefing materials for managers and practitioners. These materials were used in workshops with the five government entities that helped with the project and will be used in the future to engage further entities.

Project Outcomes

The main deliverables of the project are shown in the figure 1 and described below. In all, over 200 technical standards were selected and described. A bi-lingual data standards catalogue was developed containing common data definitions, XML schemas for almost 30 services and 58 code lists to support these.

In addition to the items that form the framework, other documents were delivered as part of the project. These provide background on the eGIF and information that is useful in moving the eGIF forward and engaging further government entities.

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