Business Architecture

The Business Architecture defines and provides detailed description of the business areas, government-wide lines of business, their associated government functions and services performed by the RGoB. It ensures strategic alignment of business functions and services to the objectives of the RGoB, and promotes collaboration amongst RGoB agencies in delivering government functions around common business areas. The Objective of this reference model is to align services and functions performed by different agencies within the RGoB with the business objectives of the RGoB.

Business Architecture Components

BRM provides a complete government-wide perspective of Lines of Business, the associated Government Functions, and the services delivered by the RGoB. The BRM does not cover National Defence, the National Council and the National Assembly, Office of the Gyelpoi Zimpoen and HM secretariat. The following is an example of a government-wide line of business, its associated Government Functions and Services. The line of business falls under the Services to Public vertical business area. Services are first categorized according to the service categorization matrix. As shown, the each quadrant indicates the value of a service in two dimensions: value to department, and value to user.

Service Rationalization

The rationalization agenda is primarily established to move away from agency centric view of the services and make them citizen-centric by taking a whole-of-government perspective. This means looking at each and every service from a point of view that considers the actual use of the service. The following aspects can be considered during this activity. Elimination of duplicates: If the same or similar service is provided by more than one agency, consider creating only one service and eliminate the redundant ones. This might mean only one agency providing the service, or two agencies co-operating to provide a single service for the user.Remove pre-requisite services: There are services that are required as a pre-requisite to other services. For example, a birth certificate may be needed to access multiple other services. A birth-certificate otherwise serves no other useful purpose. Therefore, this service can be included as an automated verification check of birth records for the dependent services; there is no need for a standalone service to issue birth certificate. This is possibly true of many other registration certificates. we should consider if they really need to be issued as certificates, or is it enough just to record the fact of registration and use this record for granting access to dependent services. Eliminate duplication of common services: If a service can be replaced by a common service, consider eliminating it and moving to the common service. The requirements of each case needs to be elaborated. There has to be certain give and take to move towards the common service because a common service may not satisfy 100% of the requirements of the existing service; but this is to be expected so architects need to persuade the stakeholders of the benefits of using the common service. Refer to section 4 for suggested list of common services.

Line of Services

These services belong to the Line of Business(LOB) financial management[5].

The above Exhibit demonstrates the Services belonging to Line of Service "FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT"

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The Objective of Enterprise security architecture is to provide conceptual design of security infrastructure, related security mechanism and security policies and procedures. The architecture links components of security infrastructure as a unified unit. The goal of this cohesive unit is to protect information. The enterprise security architecture must ensure Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability throughout the enterprise and align with organization's core goals and objectives.

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Application Architecture

Application Architecture defines the detailed description of the application systems used within RGOB. These application systems are needed to manage the data and support the line of businesses, government functions and services. It also documents a list of reusable application components of these application systems. The objectives of this reference model are to facilitate interoperability between application systems, identify reusable application components and facilitate application maintenance.

Categorisation of Application System

COMMON APPLICATIONS: These applications are common government-wide. These applications allow for the greatest economies of scale, usually comprise of all horizontal functions that have highest potential for sharing and commonalities. A representative list of possible common applications is given below. To qualify as a common application, the process supported by the application has to be common across WoG: for example, requesting and granting of leave. Secondly, the process has to be self-contained within each department. GROUP APPLICATIONS:These applications are applicable within the confines of a cluster. A cluster comprises of a group of ministry / departments that provide services in a single domain (e.g. health, transportation, education, social welfare, agriculture), and therefore bring in some scope of shared services and common assets within the cluster.DEPARTMENTAL APPLICATIONS:These applications belong within the confines of a single ministry / department. These services are self- sufficient within the agency and require no interaction or exchange with any other agency.CROSS-CUTTING APPLICATIONS:These are functions initiated by a lead agency, but require the involvement of multiple other agencies as stakeholders to perform specific, assigned tasks and activities within the service, contributing to successful completion. These multiple stakeholders participate in the service delivery in an orchestrated manner (i.e. they are subject to rules and sequencing). Some examples of this type of application are procurement, revenue management, disaster management etc.

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Technology Architecture

The Technology Architecture aims to support the E-GIF vision of delivering effective, automated and connected services of the highest standards and quality with a Whole of Government perspective. The intention is to provide a long-term view with a focus on the future technological needs. The vision sets the foundation for strategic technology planning, to provide flexible, efficient, common ICT solutions supporting citizen centric services, which enables RGoB to successfully achieve its goals and objectives and contribute towards achieving Gross National Happiness

Access Domain

The access domain is described by end user access architecture. It has four layers namely- User, device, connectivity and service layers. Typically, user layer describes the types of users accessing government services, which are broadly divided in 3 types as 1· Citizens 2· Government Employees 3· Businesses. In order to achieve real ubiquitous service access, the user should be able to access the services at any point of time, from anywhere and any device such as PDAs/tablets, laptop/desktops, Smart Phones, Service Kiosks, etc. Hence, it is very important to provide the last mile connectivity infrastructure as mentioned in the connectivity layer of the exhibit.

Integration Domain

The integration domain describes building blocks used for interaction between various system environments for seamless delivery of service. It also covers services, which are used across government agencies and delivered by common applications. Middleware in the context of distributed applications is software that provides services to enable the various components of a distributed system to communicate and manage data, acting as â??glueâ?? to connect all systems together. Middleware supports and simplifies complex distributed applications. It includes web servers, application servers, messaging and similar tools.

Server Domain

The current server infrastructure is distributed and maintained by respective departments of RGoB. All the applications run on separate physical servers leading to underutilization of resources. Hence, there is a need of consolidation and virtualization of servers and storage for cost-effective, efficient, scalable and available architecture. RGoB has a vision to move towards cloud. Virtualization is the preliminary step towards that. Server architecture is an important part of platform domain. It normally has 3 layers â?? Web, Application and DB which cater to different requirements. The proposed server architecture will enable government to migrate from traditional environment to modern virtualized environment.

Storage Domain

Information has become our most valuable asset. The challenge lies in making information available and keep it secured. To achieve this, storage becomes important part of IT architecture. As of now, different departments of RGoB are maintaining their own setup of storage infrastructure. As we move towards architecture supporting connected government, inter-operable systems and boundary less information flow, the islands of storages have to be consolidated into a centralized virtual pool of resources. This will help in achieving centralized management, cost effectiveness, faster provisioning and lesser time to rollout new services.

Network Domain

The enterprise network is another important building block of technology architecture. It depicts the connectivity infrastructure both at Data Center as well as at WAN level. TWAN is a government network, which provides a secure and dedicated environment for the RGoB to conduct its business functions. It is a high-speed network connecting all ten ministries, the Prime Minister's office and other government agencies in Thimphu. The Dzongkhag administration offices are also connected to this network. This connection is further taken to Gewogs and Dungkhags as well as Community Centres (CCs). RGoB should leverage TWAN to provide government services to agencies as well as to the public through the CCs.

Data Center Domain

The Government data centre seeks to provide services such as hosting, connectivity and managed IT services. This will enhance service delivery to the public as well as within the Government. Having a Government Data Centre will extend several benefits such as: 1· Consolidated demand and use of resources 2· Reduced cost of maintaining and managing data centre physical infrastructure and associated costs 3· Increased efficiency of data centre ICT assets 4· Improved matching of data centre ICT facilities to business need 5· Standardized ICT infrastructure architectures and sharing of resources. RGoB has a vision to provide some of the government ICT services as cloud services in future for which Government Data center will be built with the capability of providing cloud services. While upcoming BITC Data Center will cater as the core data center, there is no specific plan to build a DR facility but the government is contemplating the possibilities of using Bhutan Telecom (One of the ISPs and Mobile Ops in the country) Data center located in Phuntsholing (Southern Belt of the country) as a Disaster Recovery Site. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery are closely related practices that describe a Government's preparation for unforeseen risks to continued operations. Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity and prior to selecting a disaster recovery strategy, a disaster recovery planner first refers to business continuity plan which should indicate the key metrics of recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) for various Government services.

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Data Architecture

Architecture defines standards to describe, share, structure and classify data. It identifies the common data for data integration and institutes a standard data management practice. The objectives of this reference model is to enable information sharing, data reuse and enhance the accessibility and integrity of the data, with due considerations to data protection.

Data Architecture Components

The Data Architecture Components consist of Data Integration, Data Access, Data Security, Data Lifecycle, Data Migration, and Data Models

Data Access

Data access model defines data access privileges for business processes that creates, updates and deletes data in an application system. This model ensures that the data in the system is maintained in a consistent manner (i.e., ensures data integrity by applying a set of common rules when adding, changing, and deleting the data. Data Access model also defines the principles on which access rights shall be given to different roles in the database administration. For RGoB, these rights shall be defined precisely in respect of all the Core Datasets and Master Datasets.

Data Lifecycle

Data Lifecycle management is a policy based approach to manage flow of information systems data throughout its lifecycle: from creation and initial storage to the time when it becomes obsolete and is deleted. The lifecycle crosses different application systems, databases, and storage media. There is a special emphasis and detail in relation to the Core Datasets and Master Datasets from data lifecycle modelling perspective.

Data Migration

When an existing application is replaced, there will be a critical need to migrate data (master, transactional, and reference) to the new application. Data migration model identifies data migration requirements and also provide indicators as to the level of transformation, weeding, and cleansing that will be required to present data in a format that meets the requirements and constraints of the target application. Data Migration process consists of three high level phases: Plan: The planning phase involves determining the requirements of the migration, identifying the current and future environment, and creating and documenting the migration plan. Migrate: This migration phase completes data migration from source to target system. It involves the steps like data assessment, design, build, execution, transition and production. Validate: After migration is completed, the migration process has to be validated using well defined validation methodology. It includes the steps like check lists, preparing test plan, run the test plan and validation of results etc.

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