Developing a service oriented E-government architecture towards achieving E-government interoperability

E-Government offers a new electronic channel by means of which citizens and government ministries can interact with one another, unconstrained by the locations and schedules; and thereby improving government effectiveness. However, realizing this vision is strictly depending on the ability of diverse computing systems owned and managed by different government ministries to be able to interact together across all ministerial boundaries. This ability is known as e-government interoperability. Since ministries have built their computing systems independently with specifications and solutions relevant to their particular needs but without adequate attention to the need to interact with other ministries systems, this has result in a patchwork of heterogeneous computing solutions that have limited coherence and are largely uncoordinated.Therefore, during the last few years, e-government interoperability has been an important research area. To this direction, although several approaches have been proposed, all these approaches would be insufficient since they are theoretical solutions and technically focused. In this paper low level e-Government architecture is proposed driven by Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to solve the architectural problem in achieving seamless e-government interoperability. This architecture acts as unifying architectural vision and helps in finding a common understanding of e-government and its realization.