Programmable Messaging for Electronic Government

Seamless Government is a new paradigm for public administration that promotes collaboration and networking between government agencies and between public, private and voluntary sectors as a way to better respond to the needs of citizens, businesses and other arms of government. There are many benefits of collaboration in government. One is the delivery of Seamless Public Services, made available through one-stop access points, both electronic and traditional, according to the needs of customers and not the internal structure of government. Another is improved efficiency in government, aiming at eliminating duplicate efforts and making better use of scarce public resources. However, the paradigm presents numerous implementation challenges: (1) Legal - recognizing electronic processes as equivalent to paper-based processes; (2) Financial - funding multi-annual, cross-agency projects; (3) Social – building human capacity able to utilize new technologies; (4) Organizational - establishing processes that seamlessly cross organizational boundaries; and (5) Technological – building solutions that integrate software and processes across organizational and administrative boundaries, able to adapt to changing legal and organizational requirements.

This thesis presents the concept and foundations of Programmable Messaging – a paradigm for automated exchange of messages between collaborating entities to respond to diverse communication needs of complex and dynamic collaborative environments, such as the environments characterizing Seamless Government. It also presents a concrete realization of Programmable Messaging – Government-Enterprise Ecosystem Gateway (G-EEG). G-EEG is a high-level communication and coordination platform to support collaboration across multi-organizational processes and applications. The requirements for G-EEG were identified following two studies: on the nature of collaborations between agencies, following a survey of public administration system in Macao, and on available technical solutions to enable such collaborations. In order to implement these requirements, G-EEG comprises three components:

1) G-EEG-CORE - a run-time messaging framework that enables asynchronous exchange of messages between registered members along dynamically created and subscribed channels;

2) G-EEG-EXTEND - a repository of horizontal (process-independent) and vertical (process-dependent) extensions and a mechanism to dynamically enable such extensions on top of G-EEG-CORE; and

3) G-EEG-DEVELOP - a development framework to rigorously specify, design and verify messaging extensions, from the scratch or from existing extensions.

G-EEG was designed to be: minimalist – based on the smallest possible number of concepts; extensible – the rich functionality required by applications is available through extensions in the G-EEG-EXTEND repository or through the G-EEG-DEVELOP development framework; dynamic - communication structures can be dynamically created and modified at run-time; and reliable – parts of the framework are based on a formal model, enabling rigorous development of new extensions. G-EEG can be used by government agencies to exchange messages through carefully managed logical communication channels, with necessary extensions enabled over them. Based on G-EEG concepts, a research prototype was built through rigorous use of modelling and analysis in various development stages.

The main contributions of the thesis are: (1) the concept of Programmable Messaging, (2) the definition, formalization and implementation of G-EEG as a concrete realization of Programmable Messaging, (3) a formal model for XML and XML family of technologies resulting from the formalization effort; (4) a comprehensive survey of the concepts and challenges of Seamless Government, (5) rigorous assessment of G-EEG with respect to Seamless Government, and (6) a framework for assessing organizational, technological and foundational solutions to Seamless Government.