In order to place citizens and companies at the centre of a modern and innovative public administration, the Portuguese Government is investing in a public administration interoperability platform (iAP), connecting all the dots and services between the multitude of public entities and digital platforms that accumulate public information.
The project reflects the Portuguese Government’s interoperability strategy, which has been considered an important topic for a long time. The government has realised that to achieve a fully digital public administration, public services should be allowed to exchange data in real time, facilitating the only-once principle, whereby citizens don’t have to provide information to a public administration that is already in a public administration database.
AMA – Agência para a Modernização Administrativa, is in charge of the project, and is developing a tool to address semantic and technical interoperability to assure meaningful information exchange within Portuguese public administration. This solution will also guarantee the organizational interoperability required to provide contact points between different organisations and facilitate communication between them.
The iAP project addresses all levels of interoperability (legal, organizational, semantic and technical), and promotes governance and the use of shared platforms. By implementing a central platform the project ensures that one entity, with a single connection, is connected to all public administrations in a secure way, because all communication takes place within a private network.
The shared tools developed in iAP comprise system interconnection, identity federation, authentication federation, messaging and payment, providing an agile and cost-effective way for public services to develop multichannel services and respond more rapidly to citizens’ needs.
As part of the project some very important services are already in place, like My Street (A minha Rua), Address Changing (Mudança de Morada) and Fiscal Debt Validation (Verificar existência de dívida). In total there are more than 35 entities involved and 80 services available.
Policy Context
The iAP project started in 2006/2007 with the main aim of creating a tool to address semantic and technical interoperability between public services, ensuring meaningful information exchange within the Portuguese public administration. The project is under AMA administration because the Agency’s mission includes providing guidelines in interoperability, specifically by creating and disseminating a National Interoperability Framework (NIF).
A ministry council resolution from 2009 called for the creation of an inter-ministerial ICT network which already included an interoperability group. More recently this plan was taken further by the Global Strategic Plan to Rationalize and Decrease ICT Costs in Public Administration, which identified the need to promote the use of iAP within public administration.
The goal is to include in iAP the main services that will allow information exchange, specifically to permit fulfilment of administrative requirements in a much faster and convenient way, but also to facilitate the delivery of multichannel services and the expansion of services provided by Citizen Spots (Lojas do Cidadão).
Simplification is one of the keywords, providing better governance and citizen empowerment over their own data. iAP is already in use, providing information in real time from different sources, like justice, social security, finance and internal affairs, acting as a central node with a catalogue of web services that can be used by all entities in public administration.
Description of target users and groups
The project is focused on citizens’ and companies’ needs, promoting the use of services that facilitate data flow within a multitude of public administration entities, based on the principle that no one needs to provide information that already exists in public databases. Public entities should only collect the necessary user information regarding a single service, so the citizen won’t have to repeat data.
There is also a project to create a Citizen’s Console from which every citizen, with the proper authentication, can interact with the iAP and give or withhold permission for the transmission of federated messages between public services containing his or her own personal data. The console will also give access to information about the messages that circulate with the citizen’s data.
Description of the way to implement the initiative
The scale of the project required a huge effort in terms of governance from the AMA and various public entities, requiring the involvement of several departments from different ministries. As the goal was ground-breaking the iAP project was separated into several phases, with different targets, managed using the SCRUM methodology.
In 2006/2007 the first steps were taken to implement an interoperability platform, and the iAP was operation in 2008/2009, providing technical interoperability and implementing a canonical data model that ensured semantic data exchange between the different informational system data models.
At that time, the main integration project in operation was the Citizen Card Integration with the justice, finance, social security, health and electoral systems, which became the basis for several services in the years to come.
After this very complex project, the main targets defined were to make use of the platform more widespread, provide a wider catalogue of services to be used by public administrations, and to extend the informational architecture of public administration. The AMA and Portuguese Government’s goals also included creating, updating and disseminating the National Interoperability Framework (NIF), and ensuring the technical evolution of the Interoperability Platform.
Technology solution
iAP is a shared platform, so all entities that use it are part of the project. AMA is in charge of the evolution and corrective maintenance and operation of iAP, using its internal resources, but outsourcing services to private companies, mainly to ensure the technical evolution of the Platform.
The technology platform was based on a SOA and open standards, providing real time access to authentic sources of information and an Identity Federation mechanism. Protocols such as Simple Object Access Protocol Web Services Description Language, Web Services Addressing, Web Services Reliable Messaging, Web Services Security and Web Services Security with Username Token Profile were put into place, and the orchestration module uses Apache ODE.
The benefits gained by the use of open standards were technological independence and reduced investment and operational costs, but also an accelerated integration time, obtained by exposing and reusing web service integration projects that take less time to complete.
Once the technical solution had been selected, AMA also considered the advantages of integrated management of the platform in a single back-office, and the high scalability provided by an asynchronous architecture.
The option of an Identity Federation Mechanism allows data exchange between different information systems without sharing sectorial knowledge and ensures, for example, that justice can send a message using the civil identification number of a citizen to the finance system, which receives the information along with the VAT number, allowing personal data protection within public administration.
In addition to AMA resources, the initial project to develop the platform also involved the collaboration of three private companies - Siemens, Microsoft and Accenture - over a 9 month period.
Technology choice: Open source softwareMain results, benefits and impacts
The scope and extent of the iAP project within the Portuguese Public Administration has enormous potential to simplify procedures within public services, guarantying rationalisation and reduction of costs. It also has the potential to significantly improve citizens’ and companies’ access to services and information provided by different entities from central administration. By addressing several levels of interoperability, iAP promotes better governance and use of shared platforms, simplifying the development of new web services.
So far there are 80 services available on the platform, with 35 public entities using iAP and more than 700 million messages exchanged. This huge number translates into more than 650,000 messages exchanged daily. The project also implemented the Canonical Data Model and used it in the Citizen Card information exchange, in addition to a back office that allows entities to manage their services in a simple way, on top of an Orchestration Engine.
Globally the project should also provide the ICT savings that the iAP can achieve for the whole public administration. A study carried out in 2011 by Deloitte Consulting, comprising 76 public entities and 471 integration services, estimates that iAP´s adoption by all Public Administration services will result in savings of 34 million euros over 5 years, due to reduced human resource requirements due to the automation of work, concentration of communications, reuse of web services, standardisation and the use of a shared platform.
Return on investment
The project is partially funded by the government, and partially funded by European funds to support some of the investments. The initial investment to deploy the Platform was made in 2006/2007 by UMIC - Agência para a Sociedade do Conhecimento, the former agency for eGovernment services strategy, and was around 2 million euros. The annual costs of evolution, corrective maintenance and operation are around 300.000,00 €.
