KEY TO DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN GOVERNMENT

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1 INTEGRATION: KEY TO DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN GOVERNMENT Integration improves service delivery, reduces costs and enables greater transparency TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 A government of siloed systems 2 Getting past this point 3 Building smarter cities, states and nations 5 Software AG and the Government Service Bus 5 Take the next step Not all government systems and services are created equal. Some share data and expose their services quite readily; others stand alone, seemingly aloof, incommunicado. You don t have to ponder that dynamic for long to realize that government systems that don t work well together can create complications and inefficiencies that outweigh the benefits of a single application s speed and performance. Think about it. How well can a government s change-of-address service, for example, operate if it can t access address information that resides on another system? It doesn t matter that the system can process millions of address changes in seconds if it takes hours to pull the addresses from one system and manually load them into another. From the taxpayer perspective, it takes too long to get the information they want. In the Age of the Customer, the customer expects speed. That s one reason why every entity needs to go digital. This white paper looks at the state of system and service integration within the public sector at all levels, from local to national and offers a way to quickly and cost effectively move past this state and on the path to digital transformation. A government of siloed systems The history of the evolution of information technology is on public display in most government offices. Monolithic mainframes running in batch mode came first. They introduced huge performance improvements in certain areas. But they were never designed to cooperate with one another or to share information with other mainframes. That wasn t an intentional slight; it was simply a reflection of the infancy of the information age. WHITE PAPER

2 The arrival of the so-called mini computer enabled government agencies at every level federal, state/provincial, county, municipality to ramp up the construction of software solutions. Liberated from the centralized control of the teams managing the mainframes, organizations were built with the needs of their unique constituencies in mind. On the one hand, that frenzy of activity enabled governmental agencies to do many specific things much more efficiently than before. Yet it also created even more process isolation and complexity. As a result, the number of applications delivering process improvements is larger than ever, yet most of these applications still stand alone. Look at any government office today and you ll still see this history playing out. Personal computers dot the desks. But where the real work of government is concerned, these devices are acting as dumb terminals, connecting government employees to applications running on a variety of siloed back-office systems. You may even see a lot of tablets and smartphones but these play almost no role in most established government systems because a government of siloed systems was never designed to work with them. Whereas the private sector has embraced a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) approach to enabling individuals to use the tools they know, the public sector has largely been unable to follow suit. It s not necessarily a lack of enthusiasm for a BYOD approach; it s an inability to accommodate that approach, given the lack of integration and connectivity that exists within a given agency. Tablets and smartphones might enable people to interact with their local, regional and national governments far more easily, but only if the service delivery infrastructure of government at all levels evolves. Getting past this point This history is not devoid of attempts to integrate these disparate systems. Throughout the evolution of this siloed environment, there have been efforts to bring order to the disorder that s increasingly obvious to those who have to manage all these different solutions on a daily basis. As integration techniques and technologies improved, it became possible to connect different solutions (internally and externally) in ways that would enable them to exchange information. Using this point-to-point approach to integration, systems share information often involving an intermediary system that would transform data from the originating system into a format that the consuming system could understand. But because point-to-point integration projects were time-consuming and expensive, they were undertaken very selectively and only when such projects were not competing with other initiatives (such as those involving security) for funding. Over time, some of the systems in an agency s back office have been connected; others not. The idea of connecting every application and every data repository even within a given municipality or region, and even recognizing that some applications and data repositories would not be connected for security or privacy reasons never made it off the drawing board. When the only way to enable these connections involved pointto-point integration efforts, the complexity of such a wide-reaching integration effort rendered the idea moot from the start. Yet there lies the barrier that must be overcome. Governmental agencies and IT architects must approach the challenge of integration in a different manner. A point-topoint approach to integration is not the only approach. A better approach from the vantage points of cost, efficiency, flexibility, security and transparency is to undertake an integration effort that builds on an independent, standards-based conduit designed expressly to facilitate the movement of digital information. 2

3 This digital information conduit is best conceived as a common information bus built to government scale. It s system-agnostic and open in its architecture designed to integrate easily yet securely with any system or repository in use. This bus can enable integration outside the entity as needed from municipal to county and state levels, to regional or national levels, even integration with extra-governmental agencies and contractors. Instead of trying to interconnect individual systems and services on a pointto-point basis, an agency would simply connect each system or service to this shared services bus. Any system connecting to the bus would be able to push information out for consumption by other systems or services attached to the bus. Similarly, any application or service attached to the bus could pull information from other applications and systems attached to the bus simply by making the right request, possessing the proper credentials and approvals and so on. Connecting all systems to each via a shared information bus creates a much simpler, much more easily managed integrated infrastructure. The interfaces to the bus are open, standardized and well-documented. Integration efforts become readily duplicated among similar systems. These attributes, in turn, enable an IT team to integrate systems more rapidly and at a far lower cost than would be incurred in a point-to-point integration project. In short, an agency can deliver better services, at a lower cost, not only to its own constituents but also to other agencies and entities that might be able to benefit from easy access to the data and services it manages. Building smarter cities, states and nations This kind of integration and connectivity using a common information bus lies at the heart of many governmental efforts to transform and improve service delivery, reduce costs and enable greater transparency. In most cases, these efforts are simultaneously advancing goals with which they once seemed to be competing: increasing security, expanding a cloud strategy and enabling a well-managed mobile strategy. These efforts are taking place around the world and at every level of government. Consider these few examples. In southern Africa: A municipality serving more than 3 million citizens has implemented a series of digital transformation projects using a government service bus-based approach. This municipality has integrated and optimized service delivery solutions in six different departments, including energy, water and sanitation, corporate and legal, city development, infrastructure services, and health and social services. By facilitating the integration of siloed systems, the municipality has cut service response times by as much as 70 percent. It has enabled more than 100 different healthcare clinics each of which had been using distinct systems and processes to support service delivery to work together, reduce duplication of effort and improve the experience of those needing care. In South America: A large municipality has undertaken a substantive smart city initiative with the goal of driving green economic growth and social inclusion. It has built out an urban transport infrastructure that can now bring citizens from the outlying areas into the city center in minutes (a trip that previously might have taken hours) and, in parallel, has evolved an integrated communications infrastructure that enables any citizen with a smartphone or tablet to communicate with more than 45 municipal agencies with ease. Much of the work in bringing this integrated communications solution to fruition involved connecting applications from the different departments via a shared communications bus so they could share information quickly and easily. Several agencies incorporated new applications and the flexibility of a standards-based communications bus made it easy to evolve an expanding infrastructure in this way. As older applications are retired, an agency can replace them with newer applications, connect those new applications to the shared bus, and plug right into an integrated information infrastructure. Today, with personal, online and mobile options for interacting with these different agencies, interactions have skyrocketed. Citizen interactions with one agency have climbed from 10,000 to 90,000 interactions per year. 3

4 In North America: Two state-level agencies undertook a project to share information that had previously been inaccessible due to the siloed nature of their early implementations. The state s Labor and Industry (L&I) department, charged with managing the state s unemployment compensation claims, was supposed to stop paying benefit claims if a claimant was arrested and incarcerated during his or her period of unemployment. Yet, because the department had no insight into whether a given individual was currently in a county or state prison, it routinely paid out benefits when it was not supposed to. By integrating the systems supporting L&I with those supporting the state s justice department, the systems at L&I that manage unemployment compensation are updated immediately when a claimant is incarcerated. As a result of these integration efforts, the L&I department projects it will avoid losing more than $120 million to fraudulent claims on an annual basis. Other integration efforts that build on the success of this one are enabling county and municipal law enforcement agencies to gain real-time access to information arising from other jurisdictions. In the past, a description of a vehicle involved in a hit-and-run accident in one county might not have been available for hours to law enforcement officers in the neighboring county. But by connecting the existing municipal communications systems to the digital communications bus, the law enforcement agencies throughout the state can have access to that description in seconds. These examples show that, the size of the governmental entity isn t an issue. The flexibility of a digital communications bus, properly implemented, can scale to meet the integration needs of any entity. And, because of this scalability, it can be implemented cost effectively at any level. The bus can facilitate integration in a rural township, an urban municipality, a state or province with hundreds or thousands of distinct municipalities. Upward and onward it can grow, too, supporting whole agencies and ministries at the state and national levels. Not an ERP system Many states and municipalities considering the challenge of improving service delivery are looking at monolithic Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions. On the one hand, this would seem to make sense: Conceptually, an ERP system is designed to support all aspects of a large organization in a comprehensive, integrated manner. The individual parts of an ERP solution are supposed to be integrated into a cohesive whole and pass information among different components. Yet this approach is actually fraught with peril. ERP implementations are costly, complex and time-consuming. Instead of capitalizing upon investments already made, any agency or government entity deploying a new ERP solution would need either to abandon its existing systems and applications or find a way to port the existing data into the ERP environment. That may be possible. It will be time-consuming and expensive. Moreover, an ERP solution is ultimately static. Once the system has been architected, deployed, tested and validated, it should not be changed. Indeed, as long as you do not change it, it should perform as it was intended to perform. Instead, a Government Service Bus Flexibility, though, is ultimately far more important to a governmental agency that s accountable to its citizens. As a government entity, your systems will need to change, evolve and respond to new challenges and new opportunities. You have neither the luxury of time which would be required for a large-scale ERP deployment nor can you afford to abandon entirely investments already made in applications and infrastructure, which, again, you would effectively do if you opted to take the ERP path. To build on what you have already built and gain more from existing investments you need to find a way to bind them together quickly, effectively and in a manner that delivers clear benefits to the taxpayers expecting both services and responsible governance. An approach to integration that relies on a digital communications bus ensures the flexibility that government groups require. The bus accommodates all systems, not just those from a single ERP vendor. Moreover, it future-proofs an agency s infrastructure like no static ERP system could: It provides a secure framework into which you can connect not only today s solutions but tomorrow s as well which ensures the investments in future solutions will be able to interact with the processes and the data stores you ve already established. 4

5 Software AG and the Government Service Bus Software AG has played a role in all the government integration examples already described in this white paper. Our Digital Business Platform delivers the services required for security, integration, performance and scale. Its Government Service Bus technologies are built on open standards and well-defined interfaces to facilitate rapid, reliable and secure integrations. With Software AG, any agency can integrate applications and data to deliver greater levels of performance for constituents, at a lower cost, and with increased transparency and accountability. Government users and citizens alike can access systems and services exposed through the Web and mobile interfaces yet only those to which they have authorized access. Both the Digital Business Platform and the Government Service Bus provide security and access control features to ensure the integrity of the applications and data within the connected infrastructure. Management and auditing services enable end-to-end process insight and transparency. As a platform for delivering services, the Digital Business Platform also makes it easy for an agency to deliver new services that can take advantage of the information and applications that already exist. Built with change in mind, these applications can be assembled quickly from re-usable components and distributed to support millions of potential end users. As agency or constituent requirements evolve, you can throw away an app and rapidly build a new one to address new requirements while continuing to take advantage of the underlying business logic hosted by the platform. What makes this even more flexible for governmental IT decision-makers is that Software AG s platform is suitable for deployment on-premises, in the cloud as well as in a hybrid model that embraces both the on-premises and cloud modalities. Finally, Software AG can help any government entity develop and execute a strategy for digital transformation. The journey to digital government is not impossible, and Software AG s experience can help an entity align its transformational plans with its strategic plans to deliver better services, reduce costs and enable greater transparency and accountability to the taxpayers it serves. Take the next step Government agencies lag behind the private sector in information systems integration with many siloed systems and processes that are difficult to manage and costly to maintain. Agencies and the citizens they serve need access to the right information at the right time to make the right decisions. Yet in today s dis-integrated environment, they can t always access it. With the ongoing digitization of society and the evolution of the connected citizen, government agencies at every level are hearing an increasing demand for a frictionless citizen experience, for services that are responsive, coordinated across departments and agencies, and complete. 5

6 Software AG s Digital Business Platform and Government Service Bus technology can enable your agency to interconnect all your IT systems. This changes the historical dynamic and creates a fully integrated service delivery infrastructure that s hardwareand software-agnostic, scalable, flexible and future-proof. With this kind of integrated infrastructure, your agency can: Increase operational efficiencies Reduce the risk of poor decision outcomes (such as charges, sentencing, probation and criminal release) Provide citizens with more accurate information in real time Leverage cloud and mobile services more effectively Transform into a digital government organization Software AG is singularly well positioned to support an agency s needs. With Software AG, you ll find the technologies and services your integration project requires. Count on our experience gained through real-world government projects around the world to ensure the success of integration. Get on the right path to digitization with Software AG. Contact your Software AG representative today to learn more. See how Software AG can facilitate your digital transformation to meet the dynamic demands of the 21 st century. 6

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8 ABOUT SOFTWARE AG Software AG offers the world s first Digital Business Platform. Recognized as a leader by the industry s top analyst firms, Software AG helps you combine existing systems on premises and in the cloud into a single platform to optimize your business and delight your customers. With Software AG, you can rapidly build and deploy digital business applications to exploit real-time market opportunities. Get maximum value from big data, make better decisions with streaming analytics, achieve more with the Internet of Things, and respond faster to shifting regulations and threats with intelligent governance, risk and compliance. The world s top brands trust Software AG to help them rapidly innovate, differentiate and win in the digital world. Learn more at Software AG. All rights reserved. Software AG and all Software AG products are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Software AG. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners SAG_Key_Digital_Transformation_8PG_WP_May16