| 4. In which ways is the initiative creative and innovative?
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The NGI (National Gateway Infrastructure) is a National Enterprise Architecture Project initiative developed for Bahrain’s first eGovernment Strategy in year 2007 to 2010 to bring the government closer to its people. NGI is a unified electronic platform that facilitates electronic integration framework of government systems according to consistent standards and policies.
The implementation of this solution was outsourced to a company whose experience in the deployment of middleware solutions is exceptional in the region and internationally. The implementation plan consisted of multiple phases:
(1) PLANNING PHASE [June 2010 – May 2011]: Business requirements detailing the overall solution level requirements were the starting point and were used as the base reference for building the architecture of NGI. Based on the requirements, the enterprise vision of the solution was identified, which can fulfill the main objective of National Gateway Infrastructure(NGI) that is to streamline and layout a framework for ministries/agencies to provide their services and consume the services hosted by other ministries/agencies. The proposed architecture and the solution building blocks of NGI are loosely coupled and highly scalable. The architecture can be easily extended with minimal impacts to accommodate any new building blocks (if required) such as Kiosk, IVR etc. The web services security proposed for current scope of NGI is built on interoperable standards such as ws-security which can be leveraged by various channels including web portal, mobiles, kiosks etc.
(2) PILOTING PHASE [July 2010 – May 2011]: In parallel to the planning phase, this phase was started to develop pilot services to kick-start use of the NGI directly after completion. Business Requirements Documents were generated for each eService under the pilot delivery scope. Each of the selected pilot services was integrated into the ESB and exposed through the NGI. The web-portal platform was the primary consumer as the pilot phase of NGI project. The development phase adopted the ‘waterfall methodology’ for sequential design and development of a software system. Finally, several rounds of functionality testing were conducted to ensure that these services were correctly accessed and used by each of the channels connected to the NGI system.
(3) ROLL-OUT PHASE [January 2012]: Once the NGI had been established with fully operational pilot services, the Roll-Out phase was implemented by integrating the full portfolio of over 200 online services into the NGI. Each service was integrated with the ESB and exposed over the NGI to allow seamless access across compatible various channels including web portal, mobiles, kiosks etc.
(4) Monitoring and Evaluation [January 2013 onwards]: Continuous monitoring of the initiative was implemented from day one of deployment. NGI monitoring and evaluation uses an Integrated Enterprise Business Process dashboard provided by WebSphere business monitor to enable business executives to understand and measure how the IT business processes is performing and an Integrated Technical Operations dashboard provided by Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server to enable Operators and System Administrators to detect and resolve incidents proactively, view trends and historical data and calculate service level agreements. Officials from eGA regularly check both the performance of integrated services and ease with which new services can be added. Annual reports are compiled by the team and widely circulated to ensure the project continues to perform to the highest standards of excellence.
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| 5. Who implemented the initiative and what is the size of the population affected by this initiative?
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Due to the cross-departmental nature of the National Gateway Infrastructure (NGI) and its main objectives, a diverse range of stakeholders were engaged to ensure the solution developed was both representative and fully functional.
At the core of both the eGA’s ADVANCE vision and mission statement is a pledge to positively impact three key identified stakeholder groups within the Kingdom of Bahrain: Individuals, Businesses and Government; where Individuals refer to citizens, residents and visitors, Businesses refer to small, medium and large enterprises and their employees, and Government refers to government entities and their employees. This pledge defined four key stakeholder groups for the project:
Government Organizations: A range of government entities were involved in the National Gateway Infrastructure (NGI) as the creators of different services. Government entities were required to provide technical information about the architecture of their solutions and the interoperability requirements of their own IT systems.
Businesses: Businesses were consulted during the planning and implementation of the initiative to ensure that design of the solution met their need to access government services quickly and efficiently.
NGOs: Kingdom of Bahrain’s NGO community was also consulted during the design and implementation to make sure that they can easily integrate services they need into their operations. An example of this, NGOs working with economically disadvantaged families, who were asked for their requirements in accessing the Ministry of Social Development’s financial aid, services to identify at-risk citizens.
Citizens and Residents: A final group of stakeholders consulted extensively in the monitoring and evaluation phase were citizens and residents of Kingdom of Bahrain. Citizens and residents were asked to provide their feedback on access to services through the different eGovernment channels such as the web portal and mobile portal. Using their valuable feedback, the NGI team has maintained continuous monitoring and improvement of the solution.
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| 6. How was the strategy implemented and what resources were mobilized?
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NGI was initiated, supported and funded by eGA to ensure the effective delivery of eGovernment services to citizens, residents, businesses and visitors to the Kingdom of Bahrain. eGA has the ambition to integrate all services not limited to government but related to the Kingdom of Bahrain to achieve better service governance, canonical message exchange, protocol independence and loosely couple.
The execution of the project used a blend of resources both internal and external to the eGA. The project management was assumed by an internal eGA professional hired to supervise the delivery of the solution and to ensure the high standards are maintained. Other positions such as Business Process Reengineer Specialist, Business Analyst, Solution Architect, Quality Assurance, Developers and Testing were filled by a combination of eGA employees and external professionals. In addition, the technical execution and implementation was fully supported by IBM/GBM Technical Expert who has an extensive experience in implementing this project to deliver the best outcome which meet up to the highest standards and expectations.
The value of this project was USD 1,251,283.51 (BHD 471,859) comprises 4 categories:
1. Hardware and 4 year hardware warranty
2. Software licenses and one year subscription fees
3. Services deployed across all layers of Software/ Service Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and
4. Training for eGA employees.
The mode of payment term was varied. Hardware will be paid 50% on delivery and another 50% after hardware installation completed. Software Licenses was a one off payment upon delivery of the software. The service percentage payment was depends on the completion on every cycle of SDLC and upon completion of training, full amount will be paid.
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| 7. Who were the stakeholders involved in the design of the initiative and in its implementation?
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The NGI is the Enterprise Bus for the Kingdom of Bahrain, linking all government and business processes together for a seamless and interoperable user experience. Within this overall architecture, a number of concrete outputs have supported the success of the NGI:
Uniform and Consistent: NGI has been designed specifically with the ability to integrate heterogeneous systems, capable of handling all common formats (e. SOAP, REST, Web services) for information sharing. NGI creates interoperability as standard to facilitate seamless and simple integration of all government services into a common backbone. In addition, connectivity, data exchange and process integration efforts are simplified, reducing integration-related development and support costs.
Service Automation: NGI has the ability to provide highly automated and complex services to government departments. The architecture of the ESB has been created to allow innovative synthesis and collaboration between government services and non-government to share information across. SOA ensures all stakeholders like businesses and IT specialists are closely aligned.
Centralized Management & Monitoring: NGI provide the single point for managing and governing services across all agencies. This ensures agility, reusability and information sharing across various Ministries, Government agencies and business services. An extensive SOA Governance & Security policy is implemented along the development of the services realization. NGI has been developed with robust functionality to measure and improve service performance via a real-time KPI monitoring dashboard. The dashboard allowed the senior management teams throughout the government to improve oversight of services and maximize synergies between different services.
Return on Investment: The economic returns of application development that leverages SOA improve over time, as reuse of services increase. Re-usability is the key approach to ensure integration and Process Automation expense across ministries are reduced.
Simpler systems: Service-oriented architectures are based on industry standards and loosely coupled integration will reduce complexity when compared with integrating systems on a solution-by-solution API-based integration basis. They also enable future applications to mesh seamlessly with existing standards-based services. Loose coupling of components and processes also leading to improvement in service governance. Simplicity and ease-of-maintenance means that support costs are reduced and valuable IT staff freed up for strategic work. This will reduce time, cost, administrative burden, service fulfillment time and effort for the integration of eServices.
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| 8. What were the most successful outputs and why was the initiative effective?
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Continuous measurement and monitoring using best practices principles of Project management was deploymed during the implementation of NGI. eGA used the best tools and techniques recommended by the PMI (Project Management Institute) in their PMBOK standards with proper guidelines. All work was carried out in full conformity with the ISO 21500 standard for project management
eGA developed a suite of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each of the key projects developed by the authority including the NGI. The purpose of the KPIs is to ensure that all projects fully support Bahrain’s integrated eGovernment vision. The key KPIs that NGI contributed to are as follows:
• All government online services are managed through the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB): NGI is the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for the Kingdom of Bahrain.
• Yearly to support 3 eGovernment Projects technically: NGI supported then from 2010 onward
• NGI started implemented and continuous implementing service efficiency and readiness between all services between 2 government-wide systems in order to gain interoperability.
• Three eGovernment Channels significantly upgraded and integrated by 2013 – NGI supports upgrade of web portal, mobile portal and eService Centers & Kiosks
• Information available online – NGI enables simple discovery or services
These metrics were monitored throughout the lifetime of the system. NGI’s KPI and development are
discussed in the Supreme Council for Information and Communications Technology (SCICT) which is chaired by H.E. the deputy prime minister of the Kingdom. Technology awareness campaigns were conducted with various ministries, government agencies, NGOs and private sector partners to create the necessary awareness and set project expectations accurately.
The Pilot Phase is the self-explained success of NGI. It creates the confidence and capabilities of the solution. Training was conducted to familiarize and educate people on the usage of the infrastructure as well as to introduce it to the development team to adopt it internally.
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| 9. What were the main obstacles encountered and how were they overcome?
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As part of National Initiative Project, NGI encountered and overcame the following problems during implementation:
Resistance to Change from Service Providers
Challenge – One of the main obstacles to the successful integration of the NGI was the resistance to change in the development teams of certain services. The NGI team experienced a number of entrenched practices and a wish to stick within technological ‘comfort zones’ rather than explore a new system.
Solution – The NGI team implemented a comprehensive and far-reaching change management plan that managed to gradually get the necessary buy in from the impacted stakeholders by creating the awareness and the extensive training provided.
Challenging IT Formats
Challenge – Some services were developed using more difficult IT formats that were initially incompatible with the ESB. Such services were often built using closed IT systems sold by a technology provider and not designed to be interoperable with other formats.
Solution – Wherever possible, the NGI team undertook specific development work to include all available formats through the ESB. Where development was not possible or financially feasible, the NGI issued guidance to all government entities on supported formats and provided support for any agency who wished to redesign services to be compatible with the NGI. NGI with the help from Enterprise architecture team develops Standard.
Lack of IT Expertise
Challenge – NGI encountered immature understanding of available technologies and incomplete knowledge about integrating services into a common middleware in some government agencies.
Solution – NGI overcame this challenge by providing a far-reaching and flexible training Programme to all new and existing personnel to prepare them to use the solution.
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