Proposing technical interoperability standard for e-government application: case of indonesia

Abstract

Information Communication and Technology (ICT) utilization has become a backbone of e-government implementation. Five components of information system (hardware, software, people, data and network) are combined to deliver information from government to their citizen as part of public services. However, there is a interoperability challenge on e-government implementation related to information system. This interoperability problem consists of three main categories such as technical, semantic and organizational. UN Development Program has conducted a study that explains two approaches for achieving e-government interoperability. Government can apply either one or both approaches simultaneously. First approach is Government Interoperability Framework (GIF), which focuses only on technical interoperability. Second approach is Enterprise Architecture (EA). EA as holistic approach covers both technical and management aspect. This study highlights the importance of technical standard in EA and GIF. Even though technical layer is the smallest domain in interoperability framework but it has a huge contribution to handle information system interoperability through its standardization. For a specific country case, Indonesia only has an interoperability guideline without adopting both GIF and EA. The comparison analysis based on two countries case study, which implement GIF, and EA shows there is a necessity to add more information into current interoperability guideline. Heterogeneous system in unavoidable but government can reduce interoperability issues by making a standardization of recommended technology specification and define a data representation schema. Defining standard must consider several aspects such as users, developer, industry, and best practices from international organization. This will ensure that existing standard is fully supported. XML schema as part of data representation will handle semantic interoperability. Exchanged information can be meanin...