Transformed by tomorrow's technologies: Advances in ICT will revolutionise government operations

Governments of the future could be so functionally slick as to be real-time. Their responses and workflows could be automated, service-oriented and set in motion by citizen-centric events, such as online or phone-in applications for services.

If this revolution occurs, it will be thanks to many advanced information and communications technologies (ICTs) currently evolving, and also to a radical departure from the 'application-oriented' (or software-centric) technology infrastructure of today.

"Technology infrastructure design is morphing into a service-oriented design," says Andy Brauer, chief technology officer of Business Connexion, South Africa's leading provider of ICT solutions.

As a trusted advisor to the State Information Technology Agency (SITA), Business Connexion gave a keynote address at the GovTech conference in November 2006, with Brauer addressing some 600 government and industry delegates on the technologies that will transform governments. Some of these are outlined below.

Brauer notes that governments that have communications networks with businesses, citizens and their own employees, have made perhaps the biggest first strides in revolutionising their operations - in this case, their accessibility.

Wireless networks deployed by the Knysna Municipality are an excellent way of connecting government operations to large numbers of people, quickly and cheaply.

Broadband over powerline, piloted by the City of Tshwane, is a great way to cost-effectively roll out high-speed communications to citizens. Such networks, if coupled with low-cost open source software and free Internet access to citizens, will make government services much more accessible to a whole new sector of society.

The ongoing melding (or convergence) of computer and telephone networks into one multimedia network means more government service channels can operate in harmony. An example of this would be self-help IVR phone-in systems to automatically start a government process. Converged IP networks can save money through cheap or free telephone calls (voice over IP), and government workers can operate all their communications from one unified mailbox (e-mail, phone and instant messaging).

Soon we will see the convergence of cellular and wireless networks into one high-speed mobile network. The lower cost and complexity of convergent networks could save governments much overhead cost.

A top priority for government CIOs is to develop automated technological infrastructure that supports business processes in real-time, based on business events.

One example is a system that automatically actions an application for land re-zoning, made via a voice-prompt channel. It sets both human workflow and automated machine processes in motion, based simply on a citizen using online software.

Automation saves on staff costs and speeds up government reaction time. A service-oriented technological architecture (that is, a systems design that exists to support technological 'services', such as software functions, in turn supporting business functions), introduces flexibility into the system.

Brauer explains: "It allows governments to adapt their technology functions rapidly to enable the new services being introduced. Service-oriented infrastructure (hardware and software) can fetch an infrastructure 'service', such as processing power or storage space, from a pool of computing resources that aren't dedicated to any specific user, department or process." Dynamic re-allocation of such 'virtualised' resources to any new user, as needed, means huge fixed infrastructure costs are removed from government budgets.

Brauer says grids are the ultimate virtualised infrastructures. They consist of interconnected computers, each devoting processing, storage or application use to the combined solving of a problem - the purpose for which the grid was established.

Through 'virtualisation' of processors, storage disks and software, governments can cost-effectively access high-performance computing resources for undertakings like weather-pattern research or other high-impact uses.

In the huge computer rooms or data centres that governments use as the backbone of their computing infrastructures, there are still many separate components. These include network switches and routers directing traffic inside departments (local-area networks), between 'branches' (wide-area networks) and across cities (metropolitan area networks).

On top of that, separate server clusters can exist, and storage networks add a third level of complexity. The result is a high-cost and complex hardware and cabling arrangement that requires large and disparate skills pools to maintain.

Brauer says: "Infiniband is a new backplane to all these backend systems, gluing them together in one standard way to reduce overhead in training, staffing, space and cabling".

Storage discs will increase in capacity one-and-a-half times each year, while costing 30% to 40% less every year. Governments must make a choice among the throughput speeds, reliability and cost of different discs, and the array types in which they can be grouped. Broadly, small computer systems interface (SCSI) or fibre channel discs are high-speed, cost a little more and last a little longer, while serial ATA 2 (SATA) cost less, have around three years warranty and are available in storage arrays.

Furthermore, storage architectures (how the storage device is connected to the computer) influence the cost and manageability of storage for a department or workgroup. Direct-attached storage is cheap, but the administration is intense. Network-attached storage is slightly more expensive, but does not require as many dedicated storage nodes. Storage area networks are expensive, but offer flexibility, manageability and redundancy.

Brauer comments that governments need to make informed choices in this arena in order to ensure the selected technology is able to meet their requirements.

Whereas the World Wide Web today is starting to feature more advanced applications, Brauer predicts the Web of the future will have a much more desktop-like feel and utility.

He believes the application currently being used by state employees will be accessed directly by citizens, insofar as they have the access rights and can make use of them, in future, to cut out several stages of applications or other government services.

Furthermore, he says future technologies like super high-definition streaming video and super-fine resolution displays will enhance state-assisted medical research and distance learning applications, and bring education to broader sectors of society.

A super-computer with a quarter of human brainpower has already been produced. In 2065 computers might reach 'singularity', or intellectual parity - with humans.

The way society will put them to use, not to mention political issues such as the citizenship status of RoboSapiens, will become pertinent.

In conclusion, Brauer recommends the following roadmap to assist governments take advantage of the coming technological advances: Having evaluated their infrastructure maturity (or service orientation), they can start building a real-time infrastructure vision and strategy (this year), complete centralisation, rationalisation and standardisation of this infrastructure (next year), deploy point solutions based on their immediate return on investment (2009), and start offering value-added information technology-based services (2010-2014).