CAIRO, Egypt, 7th January 2015:
Delivery of ‘e-government’ is gathering pace in Egypt. At the same
time, there is a desire among public sector bodies to seize the
operational benefits and reduced costs that online services can offer.
Yarob Sakhnini, regional director, MEMA at Brocade says that
understanding how to adopt the right processes to enable collaboration
with consolidation has become a key consideration.
CLOUD FIRST?
Making digital
services widely available is seen by many in the public sector as being
primarily enabled by cloud, largely because of the capital cost
benefits, although questions on cyber-security and business continuity
remain. Government bodies in Egypt can look to what Europe is doing in
the cloud arena. The European Commission (EC) has adopted a strategy for
‘Unleashing the potential for Cloud Computing in Europe’ to harmonize
standards, develop contract terms, and establish a ‘European Cloud
Partnership’ for innovation and growth. The consequence is more effort
in developing an integrated pan-EU ‘G-Cloud’ strategy to deliver
tactical public sector guidance by identifying obstacles, finding
innovative solutions, and building trust in European cloud computing. At
the same time new standards will improve the capacity to mitigate the
risks. However, implementing new policy initiatives may become complex
and limited down the line if interoperability issues are not resolved.
This would directly impact public sector bodies’ efforts to respond to
policy directives and financial imperatives for integration,
collaboration, and consolidation. There is a risk that a multiple cloud
provider approach could weaken public sector organizations’ ability to
meet their objectives in this regard. A ‘best practice’ vendor approach,
rather than single vendor or multi-cloud, encourages development of the
right model for digital services delivery based on economies of scale
and need. It avoids government departments having to adopt a more
prescriptive model by enabling the adoption of the right onsite and
outsourced resources together, to secure cost and efficiency benefits
without putting data privacy at risk.
INCREASING EFFICIENCY: DELIVERING MORE WITH LESS
Citizens are
becoming more open to more digital, web-based, public sector services;
the benefits of services that are available 24 hours a day, seven days a
week, and can be accessed from a wide range of devices mean
e-government is becoming more acceptable. Similar to the EC’s ‘Digital
Agenda for Europe’, public sector bodies in Egypt should create an
action plan that aims for more targeted, personalized digital services
to accelerate the online access adoption rate so citizens requests and
requirements from public sector bodies become ‘digital by default’,
while highlighting the need for greater mobility and improved
accessibility.
At the same time
government bodies are engaging in data centre consolidation programmes,
moving from thousands to hundreds of data centres. This phase creates
an opportunity to build a foundation for integrating systems and
services using a mandated ‘interoperability framework’, and the delivery
model most suited to local digital service needs.
INCREASING COLLABORATION
Greater
standardization and improved interoperability offers an opportunity for
more ‘shared services’ adoption and seamless collaboration. This
includes collaboration across borders, while also offering particular
benefits for local government, police, and education. An example could
be to streamline transport licensing and permits across multiple
agencies for inter-nation heavy goods traffic, where the savings are
potentially significant for both the public administration and
commercial transport firms.
DIVERSE DATA, BIG DATA
There is dynamic
growth in the volumes of unstructured data created (which IDC estimates
accounts for 90 percent of all data); from mobile operatives, social
media dialogue, citizen self-services, and online applications or
submissions. A key success factor for continuing the improvements in
central government departments, education, police, and local government
performance is managing fluctuating digital service workloads in
conjunction with the increasingly complex big data that has historically
been difficult to access or consolidate across multiple silos.
Extensive data duplication, coming from multiple application or
registration processes, also needs appropriate processes and platforms
in place. This data requires processing and preparing for use in
analytics, and in a consolidated form will increasingly provide insight
to develop the right platforms for the emerging ‘Smart Cities’. To
support this consolidation and analysis of big data, and the required
platforms themselves, high performance networks are critical to enable
process acceleration and faster or more accurate insight delivery. The
resulting information can then be delivered to dashboards, at multiple
levels, across a public sector entity, and across borders. For
departments that provide benefits, pensions or social security, such
insight from analytics is hugely valuable in identifying and reducing
fraud, and minimizing ‘error rates’ in application processing.
THE CASE FOR A MORE INTELLIGENT INFRASTRUCTURE
Flexibility,
Scalability and Responsiveness - Managing and supporting continuing
exponential growth in ‘big data’, from multiple government and citizen
sources while supporting better interoperability, requires an
infrastructure that can scale quickly, and adapt at short notice to
different workloads, without disrupting performance. An integrated
approach which provides the opportunity to consolidate and virtualize
processes and IT systems offers the best model. Network virtualisation
and cloud ‘on demand’ services provide the automation and scalability
needed to deliver the required flexibility and management. Many onsite
public sector data centres are already close to capacity, and unable to
cope with a real-time need for information. Gaining agility during peak
traffic periods, while reducing operating costs and improving
efficiency, will all enable public sector bodies to successfully adopt
policies on digital services delivery.
ADOPTING BEST PRACTICE: STANDARD FRAMEWORKS
Public Sector
bodies in Egypt can create frameworks similar to the EU Interoperability
Framework that incorporates standards to establish a consistent basis
of best practice to simplify interoperability, and facilitate increased
collaboration and expansion. The advantage is an ‘best practice’ model
where, in many cases, the public sector entity is independently
registered and regularly reviewed.
A significant
benefit of International Standards Organization (ISO) frameworks is that
they all function in the same format of ‘plan, do, check, act’, and
therefore readily support interoperability, using a lifecycle model,
which accurately reflects the changing policy environment.
