Public Sector Innovation Amcham Eu Wernberg Tougaard
Oracle Social Welfare and the Cloud - WernbergTougaard
1. An Oracle White Paper
October 2014
Social Services and “the Cloud”
Cloud-enabling Social Welfare and Human Services –
Impact and considerations.
2. Social Services and “the Cloud”
Disclaimer
The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information
purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any
material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The
development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains
at the sole discretion of Oracle.
Executive Overview
The purpose of this white paper is to outline the options as well as the challenges that many
Governments and local authorities are facing with using Cloud technologies in providing services for
citizens and companies in the Social Welfare and Human Services area. Furthermore this white paper
provides insight on the industry solution that Oracle pursues in the area globally. The paper is part of the
proceedings of the ISSA e-Services seminar held in Baku, October 22-23rd 2014..
3. Social Services and “the Cloud”
Introduction ....................................................................................... 2
Oracle’ strategy for Cloud in Social Welfare & Human Services. ....... 4
5 Myths with respect to Public Sector use of Cloud. .......................... 6
Myth #1: Everything Will Go to the Public Cloud............................ 6
Myth #2: You’re Either Cloud or You’re Not. .................................. 7
Myth #3: Clouds Are One Size Fits All........................................... 8
Myth #4: Cloud Will Lock You In.................................................... 9
Myth #5: Reducing Cost Is the Biggest Benefit of Cloud.............. 10
Cloud and Privacy Protection ...................................................... 11
Cloud Recommendations for Public Sector.................................. 12
Oracle’ Strategy for Social Welfare and Human Services. ............... 14
Service-Oriented Architecture for Social Services........................ 16
The Componentized Enterprise Functional Architecture (CEFA) . 18
Separating policies from processes ............................................. 19
Commercial of the Shelf (COTS) ................................................. 21
Open Standards .......................................................................... 22
Learn from others – use good practices....................................... 22
Ecosystem for Influencers. .......................................................... 22
Conclusion ...................................................................................... 24
Oracle and Public Sector................................................................. 25
4. Social Services and “the Cloud”
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Introduction
Social Security Agencies, Pension Administration Agencies and Public Employment Services
all over the world have faced great challenges during the financial crisis – budgets have been
cut, funds and portfolio’s have been diminishing and more and more citizens have required
support. But with great crises comes great opportunities. Many Governments have initiated
programs to prepare the “Social Welfare System”
1
for the future – and a key consideration is
how to utilize ICT to maximize the efficiency of Public Administration, while ensure the optimal
service and “rule of law” for the Citizens.
The current decade will be influenced by a number of key technologies and approaches that
we redefine who Public Sector Organizations collaborate with their constituents. One can
certainly challenge if the “hype” around technology changes and innovations fundamentally will
change the mindsets or paradigms of Bismarck and Beveridge, but nonetheless there are
fundamental changes that will impact the way Public Sector agencies dealing with Social
Welfare and Human Services are organized, how they provide services to citizens and
companies and how quality of services are measured and ultimately valued.
There are 4 fundamental key paradigm shifts happening these years as illustrated below:
1 The term “Welfare” is used in the European style, meaning Government assisted systems to help those in
need by provide a safety net along the guidelines from ILO on the Social Protection Floor.
5. Social Services and “the Cloud”
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Mobility – as described in an earlier ISSA White Paper
2
the society is rapidly changing with
respect to where, how, who, when we can access information. With the aspect of mobility we
suddenly have an opportunity to work at the citizens own premise rather than to require them
to come to us.
Social – the age of “Social Network” is now. As citizens we post information and have dialogs
with peers utilizing Social Networks - and increasingly we expect that Public Sector engage
and interact with us using Social Networks. Furthermore the Public Sector has a responsibility
for monitoring social dialogs as these can serve of early warnings of issues – could be with
fraud on Social Security or sub-standard quality of Social Care – that the citizens exchange
views around.
Big Data – information is power, especially if it is turned into knowledge and actions. A major
issue among most Social Security agencies around the world is, that it is very difficult to trace
the impact of fund allocation to Social Benefits and the policies that they are based upon. Big
Data provides the technologies and tools for collecting, measure and visualize complex time
series patterns in Social Benefit administration as well as a number of other areas.
Cloud – is the modern world the way of reverting to past times sharing of infrastructure. In the
early days of modern computing, centralized mainframes were the only way for Governments
to collect, store and analyze information to and from the citizens. That infrastructure was a
shared infrastructure, almost always running in a centralized Government owned facility.
The cloud establish a global, shared, not Government owned environment – thus driving costs
down, as investments, maintenance and operation is per seat. The cloud reality of today is that
solutions that have been developed for cloud can be accessed from anywhere and by anyone
(who have the right access credentials).
This paper will discuss how the cloud strategy of Oracle can help Social Welfare and Human
Services organizations and will also discuss some of the unique challenges that Governments
have and how to overcome these.
2 ISSA 13th ICT Conference, Brasilia, 2012 Proceedings
6. Social Services and “the Cloud”
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Oracle’ strategy for Cloud in Social Welfare & Human Services.
At Oracle we have always been among the front runners of technology – we believe that new
innovations and new abilities are constantly needed to make more value for those we help –
whether the customer is Governments or the customers customers (the citizens) it is all about
enabling value creation – through efficiency, transformation of data into knowledge or simply
making life easier. And the same goes for Cloud. And for Social Service digitalization.
As cloud is developing there is a lot of terminology, but also innovations, that has to take place
in order to realize the potential in cloud. There is also many myths – especially on why
Governments cannot use cloud. One purpose of this white paper is to exemplify how Social
Welfare and Human Services agencies can get started with using cloud services and how the
future could look like.
But let us just dwell at the past – because the fundamental idea behind Cloud is not new.
When the first massive Public Sector ICT implementations took place in the 1960’ and 1970’
they used centralized ICT which were shared among many agencies and users, often in
Government owned subsidiaries. Government thus had their own data in their own basement.
Even today the mainframe is still being used many places – often because it is exorbitant in
terms of cost to migrate to another platform – many stories has been told of customers how
had to shop spare parts on eBay as the hardware support was long gone.
In the 1990’ the desktop revolution had taken over – but still there was a need for
Governments to ensure standardized deployment and update – which could be tricky to
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establish on a national level in a client-server (desktop) model. Hence the ASP (Application
Service Provision) was born. This had limited success – the process of turning “client-server”
into a hosted/shared reality was complicated – how do you make a desktop (Windows) piece
of Software into a multitenant hosted reality. One of the companies I worked with had invented
a process of separating desktop-applications, so that they could be hosted. This process was
called “washing” the application.
In mid 2000’ utility pricing and utilization gained speed. The idea was that why buy a powerful
it-installation when you only occasionally needed to have peak performance? What if you could
buy capacity as you bought electricity and water? With cloud computing many of the learning’
and skill’ from the past have been consolidated into one standardized vision around how to
procure ICT. You can either procure the raw iron, Infrastructure (Infrastructure as a service:
IaaS), you can buy a platform (Platform as a service, PaaS) or you can buy the applications
and solutions that you need (Software as a service, SaaS). Among the more advanced
services are data services where content (or information) are provided utilizing the cloud – like
Netflix, Dropbox, Oracle Social Cloud and YouTube (Data as a service, DaaS).
The figure below reflects on the different delivery models. But furthermore there is a “integra-
tion” component that really didn’t exist from 1960 – 2000: The Internet. As everything is
internet-enabled it really doesn’t matter where data resides from a technology point of view
(from a concerned citizens and public sector employee point of view this is a completely differ-
rent matter, as we later will discuss). Hence a service for a citizen can be “composed” or
“orchestrated” by multiple services seamlessly integrated and sharing data spanning multiple
countries.
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5 Myths with respect to Public Sector use of Cloud.
As cloud is still relatively new, there is a lot of hype, but also a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty
and Doubt). So to clarify I would like to address 5 myths on cloud that are widespread among
Public Sector business and technology leaders.
Myth #1: Everything Will Go to the Public Cloud
From a Public Sector point of view it is getting a bit tricky, because the Public Cloud is
somewhat the opposite of a cloud for Public Sector. There are basically three ways cloud
services can be provided: a) Private, ie. a cloud in your own basement (or a trusted
Government private cloud for multiple agencies), b) Public, ie. anyone can buy a piece of the
cake (the IaaS, PaaS, SaaS or DaaS), or c) Hybrid between private and public.
Most cloud implementations for Public Sector/Governments today are private clouds –
everything around access, maintenance etc. is determined by the Government, and the cloud
is private. This is generally consistent with the world trend, in which Private Cloud is growing
the fastest.
Still there is a huge pool of “Non-cloud” but the clear tendency is that over the next years that
will drop significantly – while the above is for companies, Public Sector is likely to follow this
pattern, but the transformation will be slower, and the increase in “cloudification” will happen as
a combination of non-cloud on premise, private cloud and public cloud. This will it is own rights
create a number of challenges for both the CIO’s of Public Sector, the integrators and the
solution cloud providers, as the complex puzzle has to be orchestrated and solved.
9. Social Services and “the Cloud”
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Myth #2: You’re Either Cloud or You’re Not.
Jumping to the conclusion in the above paragraph: Governments will almost certainly need to
solve the complex puzzle of co-existence of on-premise, private and public cloud that needs to
interact seamlessly not only for the business user, but also for IT.
So enabling cloud is an evolution – a journey where the past mix with the future. The aim is to
make the componentized enterprise functional architecture (CEFA, see the section a bit later)
over time operate with as much public cloud as possible in order to maximize cost, scalability
and operational efficiency. But for a foreseeable future Public Sector organizations will have to
utilize a hybrid model encompassing all past models of service digitalization.
The path of development is to identify the areas of consolidation and which areas can be dealt
with in the private cloud, and then expand non-risk areas to the private cloud. Building the
business case around the transformational path should also include considerations around it-
security as well as business resilience, as unavailability of one core component in the CEFA
might render the entire operation inoperable.
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Myth #3: Clouds Are One Size Fits All
Cloud is often seen as one thing “the cloud”, but reality is that there is a growing segregation of
services depending on what ones requirements are:
The different types of cloud offerings reflect different user needs. If you need to have access to
databases and computational power, the Infrastructure service (IaaS) would be the choice,
while providing a full-fledged Social Service application to the end-user would require multiple
pieces of Software to collaborate as a Service, why SaaS would be the answer.
As said the world of cloud is still unfolding, but the clear ambition of Oracle is to be the leading
provider of holistic cloud services and cloud solutions. While there are no full-fledged Social
Security or Social Welfare solution running in the cloud today, the clear ambition is to enable
initially a private cloud, and later a public cloud, solution cloud encompassing all the functional
requirements utilizing cloud building blocks using the CEFA architectural mindset.
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Myth #4: Cloud Will Lock You In
Public Sector has probably been among the most challenged by vendor lock-in over the years.
Vendor lock-in happens when an organizations are so dependent on a specific software or
hardware that costs of moving away becomes exorbitant. Over the years vendor lock-in was
promised to diminish as more and more global standards of interfaces, data exchange and
generally interoperability became more widespread, but recently a number of Governments
has uncritically or even cursorily embraced Open Source and solution development based on
in-house, home-build strategies without thorough evaluation of all the parameters in the
business case
3
.
But with cloud a number of the past challenges fades away, as the different cloud
implementations has the same architecture, the same standards and the same products
beneath the solution. Of course migration between cloud vendors will still be a challenge, but
at Oracle we are involved in a number of standardization initiatives to enable cloud
interoperability and coherence across cloud services. Within the Social Security and Pension
Administration domain, we are part of the International Social Security Association (ISSA’s)
initiative to standardize the requirements on interoperability and data among the global
vendors of Social Security solutions. Cloud interoperability is part of the discussions as well.
3 I can recommed my own text book chapter on how Governments should evaluate Open Source compared
to Commercial of the Shelf (COTS): Evaluating Open Source in Government: Methodological
Considerations in Strategizing the Use of Open Source in the Public Sector
http://www.igi-global.com/chapter/evaluating-open-source-government/27812
12. Social Services and “the Cloud”
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Myth #5: Reducing Cost Is the Biggest Benefit of Cloud
As mentioned before the 2000’ had a lot of focus on utility pricing – why not use/consume and
pay for IT as one would consume and pay for water or electricity? This notion makes many
think that the benefit of Cloud is only in terms of cost savings. And true – there are much to be
saved by sharing hardware and software, not only in terms of $$$, but also in terms of human
resources needed and ecologically, as power consumption per user everything else equal,
would be lower due to much better utilization of the used technologies.
But there are more benefits from the cloud than just the green effect and the cost saving.
Elasticity is used to describe how capacity can be provided on demand – when needed, one
has the extra processing power. For Social Security agencies that often happens when new
initiative in terms of benefits are announced, and all citizens want to check if they are eligible –
in such a situation scalability of the solution comes in handy. In the past the peak load often
determined the operational design – which lead to massive idle time and hence wasted
money
4
. Another value-add is speed. Speed in terms of general access (if you have to create a
new environment for testing, you could spend months, while provisioning a cloud service
literally take minutes), speed in terms of access to highest performing ICT infrastructure
(Oracle is #1 in terms of TPC-C Benchmarks globally
5
) and speedy update/maintenance.
4 Ten years ago a Public Sector agency with more than 10.000 users all had to do time-registering in the
same 15-minute window every week – the consequence was the most expensive “super-computer” was
bought and only provided work for those 15 minutes.
5 Oracle’ results at TPC-C Benchmarks: http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp
13. Social Services and “the Cloud”
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The diverse view of the benefits of the cloud also comes clear when one asks decision
makers on which benefits they deem most important when considering cloud. As the below
figure indicates, business agility – flexibility to deploy new services and functions – followed by
better use of resources are among the key benefits of using cloud. There is no reason why this
should not resonate among Public Sector organizations as well.
Cloud and Privacy Protection
One of the biggest challenges of Public Sector use of Cloud is the fear that sensitive
information will be disclosed and accessed by unauthorized people. And this is a real fear –
but it has little to do with cloud as such. If we have a private cloud implementation for a
Government that would normally run out of a datacenter placed in their own country. As such
there is not much difference between a private cloud and a hosted or BPO (Business Process
Outsourcing) solution. Still the “local” solution will have the same vulnerabilities regardless of
its deployment as the “global” as the core interconnectivity infrastructure is the Internet – and
there will still be the risk of an insider who wants to tap information for personal gains or
collusion with an outsider. Tools like GRC and extensive audit and logging is required as well.
The general view is that from an investment point of view it is more efficient to harden a single
datacenter with state-of-the-art technologies and it-security, including advanced Governance,
Risk and Compliance, while doing the same for multiple smaller installations can be exorbitant
expensive. Hence consolidation and utilization of cloud services could bring down the cost of
protecting vital information.
Many countries have a number of laws that restricts certain information to leave the country or
to have them on record “at home” in case of war. Furthermore there exist elaborate regulation
14. Social Services and “the Cloud”
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on data protection and privacy protection. I can’t stress enough how important it is to think
holistically and evaluate all steps in the chain before deploying solutions, as the cost of change
during design is factor 1, during development is factor 10-100, and during
deployment/operation is 100-1000.
Protecting sensitive information around the citizens are becoming more and more a daily issue
for Public Sector leaders. It might not be the most thrilling assignment to design the “roles and
responsibilities” and to ensure segregation of duties, but the time spend is well spend, as it will
help prevent massive breaches.
Especially the Social Security agencies are being targeted by cybercriminals as access to
personal identification information can enable them to commit cyber-fraud in terms of identity
theft. There has been a number of cases where slack in IT-security has provided access to
core personal ID / Social Security numbers
6
. But IT-security issues are not the only challenges
that Social Security agencies have to battle. As described in the Oracle White Paper on EFC
(Error, Fraud and Corruption)
7
a number of issues around collusion and fraud have
increasingly hit Social Welfare agencies.
Cloud technologies can make it much more difficult to pinpoint who to collude with in order to
manipulate internal systems, as the cloud basically is “in the cloud” – on the other hand that is
the exact challenge that Public Sector has with the Public Cloud – it is difficult to say where
information is actually stored and computed (in the future ubiquitous cloud world), why data
protection agencies can’t deem if data has been handled in accordance with regulations.
Cloud Recommendations for Public Sector
Given that there are a number of restrictions, how can agencies begin evaluating and work
with cloud? We believe that this is a ladder – and that Governments need to take a step-by-
step approach. Of course – if a national cloud paradigm for Public Sector / all of Government is
established as a proprietary Private Cloud for Governments (like it is happening in UK and
US), it is quite easy as the business case and evaluation to go for the cloud is provided and
agreed.
In order to use the Public Cloud – and hence get the most cost-effective, most flexible and
fastest capabilities, Governments and Social Security Agencies need to carefully analyze the
6 In 2012-2013 hackers gained access to the IBM mainframe storing all 5.5 mio. Danish Citizens ID. In 2007
UK lost track of 25 mio. citizens Social Security numbers as they shipped them on a CD in the mail.
7 ISSA technical Seminar, 2012, Madrid: http://www.issa.int/details?uuid=abc3d531-6300-49a4-8708-
a5edc82ef7e8
15. Social Services and “the Cloud”
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information that they want to store in the cloud – in order to respect the data privacy issues as
well as the regulatory constraints on where Public Sector information should be stored.
There are a number of areas where Social Security Agencies could use the Public Cloud:
1) DaaS Services – getting access to 3
rd
party information and collected information
(publicly available information) on the Social Media. Social Security Agencies are
considering to use these data services to validate eligibility of information provided by
citizens to fight benefit fraud and to detect early, schemes for fraudulent processes
and claims.
2) Analytics Cloud Services – number crunching and advanced analytics without trace
back to the individual citizen. Both in terms of providing geo-social knowledge on
penetration of benefit schemes and in analyzing gender, educational and other factors
that might be useful in deciding new policy for the social security benefits. The
masking of information (or decoupling with Social Security ID) will be required before
using the Analytics Cloud Service.
3) Marketing Cloud – to direct and trace campaigns towards defined groups of citizens,
like elder, social security recipients with 2 or more children, etc, Marketing Cloud tools
could be used. Furthermore it would be possible to (in the back-office, on-premise
system) to see who have seen the announcement, who responded when, did they
share with their own social network, and a number of other KPI’s around the
effectiveness of the campaign.
4) Eligibility Screening in the cloud – to provide citizens with knowledge and insight on
whether they qualify (are eligible) for specific social benefits or not, the Social Security
agency can provide a screening service where the same rules that would determine
eligibility in the case management system, are made available for the citizen.
To see how this work, we have “digitized” the current food benefit rules for US
(SNAP/TANF) and deployed this as an app (either iOS or Android) – free download of
the app called “OPA” (Oracle Policy Automation) from the respective stores.
5) Transparency on decisions – many Government organizations maintains a library of
past decisions from complaint boards and legal proceedings are stored in order to
ensure “rule of law” on future decisions in similar cases. Using Knowledge
Management cloud services, these repositories can be made available not only to the
case workers but also to the general public in order to create further transparency of
administrative practices and guidelines.
Generally if citizen specific (individual) information access is required, one needs to embrace a
hybrid solution where citizens identification is masked and stored locally utilizing pseudonyms.
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Oracle’ Strategy for Social Welfare and Human Services.
Social services programs are continuously changing and have grown increasingly complex—
and budgets are tighter than ever. Agencies must increase their efficiency while minimizing
overhead and optimizing their use of resources to help individuals and families in need.
Traditional mainframe-based systems simply can’t meet the demands of today’s social
services agencies. These aging proprietary systems create isolated silos of information that
make it dif¬ficult to manage the complex caseloads that frequently involve multiple services
and programs, and complicate the process of getting the big-picture view of case progress and
outcomes across all services and programs.
Social services agencies require IT solutions that are much more flexible, adaptable, and cost
effective than the legacy systems they have in place. This means implementing a complete
technology platform that integrates all necessary components—from the underlying database,
to the middleware, to the user-facing applications. To minimize costs and optimize
interoperability with existing legacy systems, such a platform needs to be built using open
standards. Most important, any solution must support agencies’ requirements for managing
individual social services programs and services with a design that focuses on the individual
client—while providing an integrated view across programs and services.
Oracle’s Social Services Solution delivers all this and more. By providing a complete,
integrated platform that supports case management, human resources, financial management
and procurement, content and identity management, and business intelligence, Oracle’s Social
Services solution improves program delivery and client outcomes, manages policy complexity
to ensure compliance with rules and legislation, and reduces risk and administrative cost while
increasing responsiveness to change.
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In recent years, politicians have introduced new policies at an increasing rate. Ministers often
stay in one job for less than two years, and are understandably keen to make their mark
quickly by both announcing policy changes and implementing them in a short time. But the ICT
systems that support these policies have generally prevented changes being implemented as
quickly as politicians would like. Legislative policy changes have to be made by a mandatory
deadline, thus applying more pressure to over-stretched IT resources.
Many frustrations are expressed by policy-makers that ICT does not deliver effective or timely
policy changes, while IT feels that it does not get a clear enough definition of the changes
required. The problem is particularly acute in the areas of taxation and social security, because
these are the areas where the State is usually directly responsible for both Policy and
Operations.
Oracle’s vision for Social Services is to provide a platform for the current and the future that
creates a life-cycle view of the citizen and reduces complexity for both the citizen and the
public sector employee.
Although the capability of ICT technology continues to develop rapidly with many useful new
tools and architectures, more often than not the approach in Government is to continue to
focus on increasing the efficiency of the administrative systems.
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Large budget-eating legacy systems discourage innovative approaches and they become
serious barriers to change. You often hear that “we cannot do this or that with our systems”,
despite the fact that all agree that “this or that” are desirable things to do from a policy
perspective. The equivalent in a manufacturing company would be to focus on administration
and not on how to target its products to a constantly changing market place. This is often the
reality of the Public Sector today and yet this will need to change significantly with the fiscal
crunch if service levels are to be maintained or improved. This has seemed to be an intractable
problem.
The Oracle Social Service Solution Enterprise Architecture is a response to how to solve the
problem. By combining the functional capabilities that we, during the last 5 years, acquired
through investment in companies and in product development and product innovation, we have
created a holistic vision and solution capability that solves squaring the circle.
Service-Oriented Architecture for Social Services.
Securing swift and well-working services for the citizens and at the same time enable the
organization to move towards a higher degree of efficiency and effectiveness is by many
considered to be the ultimate bliss. Our strategy on providing functional Social Services
building blocks (or Lego-bricks) enables a path to achieve these goals. Not only because
almost everything is based on agreed standards and Commercial of the shelf (COTS) building
blocks, best practices harvested from leading Social Services and Pension Administrations
around the world, but also because the solution fundamentally change the way that policy
changes are implemented in the future solution – bringing forward efficiency and effectiveness
in a previously unprecedented way.
One might think that fitting multiple components together is vastly more complex than just
buying “something” that claims to have done all of that. The problem with monolithic systems is
that all the functional elements become so interlocked that replacing a non-performing part is
impossible. Furthermore no one can claim fame on every hill - there is no such thing as a silver
bullet fixing all business and operational challenges in a nice gift wrapping. The best strategy is
to build an interoperable enterprise architecture comprising of best-of-breed building blocks
from a functional point of view. And this is the essence of Oracle’s Industry strategy and the
CEFA.
We have tried to balance the current situation and the future needs in the construction of the
enterprise architecture. Functionality can be shifted, upgraded or replaced with the least
possible impact. We believe that the Social Welfare Public Sector organizations are facing a
number of hard choices – some of the mega-trends (demographics, the financial conditions,
the citizens e-awareness and e-readiness etc.) defines or spans the space within an
organizations can optimize their operation.
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We have developed an enterprise architecture comprised of standardized, off-the-shelf
products that integrates. This gives the flexibility to extend the architecture with new
functionality or new functional areas as well as to include and respect already existing
technologies in the enterprise architecture.
Our solution architecture for Social Services comprises of key functional areas that are tailored
explicitly to specific business requirements – the Siebel Case Management provides
capabilities to handling cases, the rules and policy engine (Oracle Policy Automation) enables
efficiency of implementing rules and the ERP-component – Oracle E-Business Suite – enables
general ledger, accounts payable and payment fulfillment. Fusion Middleware provides
business process flows and data-interoperability, while Oracle Hardware enables price-
performance beyond any competitor.
Every puzzle piece is addressing key business and functional requirements, while maintaining
high updateability and scalability due to the commercial-off-the-shelf requirement. As an
example the National Danish Child at Risk system (DUBU) is 89% out-of-the-box mixing
Oracle technologies – like Siebel and Oracle Policy Automation – and third party technology
(DB2 and Tivoli).
The business and enterprise architecture that we use as a blueprint for social welfare
organizations ideal ICT-solution, respects investments already done in infrastructure and
niche-solutions. If you already have a well-working ERP system, why then replace it? The best
option is to integrate into the solution map (enterprise architecture) and understand how to
make the proper integrations. Needless to say, Oracle have out-of-the-box standard
integrations to a vast number of 3rd party system.
Case Management is basically the spine of public sector administration – this is where all the
information is aggregated and the right decisions can be taken based on transparent subset of
information. Regardless of the interface used to key in information – whether it is through a
webpage as self-service, a back-office screen or through integration with other data-suppliers,
the ability to hold metadata is the pivotal strength of the case management system. Besides
that a high number of standardized workflows and processes are available on-the-fly or out-of-
the-box which gives a very high degree of readiness from day one in the implementation
phase.
Case management components further more allow the users to gain insight to the nature of
metadata – this is extremely relevant if one want to follow the amount of cases, the turn-
around time for an application, to identify bottlenecks in the workflow process and to enable
self-service functionalities for citizens around their case – why not have a service where by
providing credentials, the citizen can see case status is, and what the average time to resolve
such a case would be? Such features are of course also available in the supporting call-center
where call-center employees easily can check status / progress and add information from the
citizens.
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Rule engines have the ability to take the written policy – in almost any language – and under-
stand the rules – what is need by the business analyst that enters the rules is a 2-days training
in how to use the marking tools – but basically the policy imported from Word or Excel will look
exactly as before – but will now be “computable” or usable for the Case management system.
An organization is able to allow the business people to maintain the business rules: no IT
involvement, no coding, no expensive consultants or programmers needed to change the
changing rules.
The Componentized Enterprise Functional Architecture (CEFA)
“No government have the same set-up, hence the same solution is not possible”-myth is
widespread among public sector leaders. The essence that every country have its own
policies, its own enforcement etc., is perfectly true – but when it comes to digitalization
technology innovation have significantly changed the reality. Now governments can utilize the
same basic solution platform – with the same generic technology components – and
implement functional services with different policies and regulations in such a manner that
modification of business rules can happen on a day-to-day schedule compared to last decade’
year-to-year schedule.
The significant changes have been brought about by a combination of trends and directions.
Firstly there is a clear trend to separate “process” from “policy” – and this has been supported
with the overall technology innovations around COTS and Rules Engines.
The Oracle Social Service solution is a pre-packaged solution architecture based on best-of-
breed functional components. The solution is implemented and in operation in a number of
organizations world-wide. The approach that Oracle have to solution development is, that
21. Social Services and “the Cloud”
19
customers should have as much choice as possible, and as much flexibility as possible. The
approach we have chosen is CEFA – Componentized Enterprise Functional Architecture. Our
solution is based on functional components that integrate completely through our Integration
Architecture.
The core benefits of such an approach is:
Customer gets access to best-of-breed technologies.
Customer can reuse already existing solutions / technologies – if the existing
document management system is well working, it can be fitted into the Componentized
Enterprise Functional Architecture (CEFA) as a component.
New releases of components can be updated / implemented without the risk of re-
implementation of the full solution.
The core components in the stack are Siebel and Oracle Policy Automation which together
with our business intelligence component makeq the application foundation. The technical
integration architecture is based on our Fusion Middleware product stack and Oracle
Database.
In the final architectural design it is possible to add a number of other components which other
customers in Social Service have used to optimize their operation. This could include tools like
Oracle Spatial which enable geo-societal visualization and analysis, WebCenter Content,
which is virtualizing paper and paper-based communication between citizens and public
authorities (C2G) and between G2G and B2G.
Addressing all key functionalities in the solution will be too overwhelming for this introduction,
but we are providing below a description of the core application for case management and the
strategies that Oracle is pursuing.
Separating policies from processes
A high number of governments around the world strive to reduce costs and heighten efficiency.
They are all looking on how to become more automated. This not only makes decisions more
transparent, but also ensures that fraud and error is brought to a minimum. Furthermore it
enables the business side of the organization to take control of how to deploy changes in rules
and regulations.
Hence, one of the clear megatrends of today is that separation of “process” and “policy” has to
take place. One has to separate what is static (the business processes) from what is dynamic
(the rules/policies). This highly affects maintainability as policy can be mastered by business
people in Word-documents and implemented by the business people in the operational
systems without the traditional use of programming – reducing it from months/weeks to hours
22. Social Services and “the Cloud”
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in changing a given policy. At the same time efficiency and the ability to act transformational in
monitoring impact of policies have become much easier.
Governments can use policies to steer / guide the behavior of citizens in a way which is still to
be developed. As a consequence of IT-implementation costs and man-hours needed at case
workers to process complex regulation and policies, many governments have sought to make
rules manageable rather than fair and simple rather than complex. Many policy regimes have
thus been biased away from the optimal formulations of rules as these would become
unmanageable and incomputable. This is not the case today – the rules engines, which in
natural language understand business rules, can help compute and develop – as well as tests
and simulate – new rules and regulations prior to deployment and hence instigate a much
higher degree of effectiveness in the formulation of policies.
A Rule engine – like Oracle Policy Automation – has the ability to take the written policy – in
almost any language – and understand the rules – what is need by the business analyst that
enters the rules is a 2-days training in how to use the marking tools – but basically the policy
imported from Word or Excel will look exactly as before – but will now be “computable” or
usable for the Case management system. An organization is able to allow the business people
to maintain the business rules: no IT involvement, no coding, no expensive consultants or
programmers needed to change the changing rules.
Social Welfare – and especially Social Security organizations are experience high gains from
using this kind of technology to empower their operation. In Sweden (at the Social Security
Agency – Försäkringskassan) a dental benefit scheme have digitized 25.000 lines of code –
and while it in the past took 4 weeks to get an application processed it today takes 1-2
seconds. Furthermore as this is an automated system, neither wrong decisions nor the ability
to influence a case worker is possible.
One of the clear megatrends of today is that separation between process and policy has to
take place. By doing this one separate what is static (the business processes) from what is
dynamic (the rules/policies). This highly affects maintainability as policy can be mastered by
business people in Word-documents and implemented by the business people in the
operational systems without the traditional use of programming – reducing it from weeks to
hours in changing a given policy. At the same time efficiency and the ability to act
transformational in monitoring impact of policies have become much easier.
Governments can use policies to steer / guide the behavior of citizens in a way which is still to
be developed. As a consequence of IT-implementation costs and man-hours needed at case
workers to process complex regulation and policies, many governments have sought to make
rules manageable rather than fair and simple rather than complex. Many policy regimes have
thus been biased away from the optimal formulations of rules as these would become
unmanageable and incomputable. This is not the case today – the rules engines, which in
natural language under-stand business rules, can help compute and develop – as well as tests
23. Social Services and “the Cloud”
21
and simulate – new rules and regulations prior to deployment and hence instigate a much
higher degree of effectiveness in the formulation of policies.
The key building blocks are what makes up the enterprise architecture – and is working
perfectly in coexistence with existing blocks, and hence preserving prior investments in
technology. Sometime existing old technology building blocks will be replaced by new blocks –
but components like Oracle Policy Automation have the ability to help migration of old code in
mainframe environments.
Commercial of the Shelf (COTS)
More and more Governments have realized that the traditional way of building their own
software stack would be a thing of the past. The risk of building complete systems based on
very specific requirements have for many Governments lead to failed projects with significant
overspending.
As a consequence organizations are often asking themselves how much of their requirements
can be fulfilled by utilizing a COTS strategy. And they are often surprised when they realize
that the maturity and embedded complexity almost match their requirements out of the box. In
the past, the question of build versus buy was a theoretical versus debate for the social
services market because commercial off-the-shelf software products were not available.
8
The key building blocks are what makes up the enterprise architecture – and is working
perfectly in coexistence with existing blocks, and hence preserving prior investments in
technology. Sometime existing old technology building blocks will be replaced by new blocks –
but components like Oracle Policy Automation have the ability to help migration of old code in
mainframe environments.
Oracle has a strong focus on delivering COTS solutions to the social services market. Oracles
Commercial of the Shelf solutions are build on industry best practice, and Public Sector
Institutions can yield huge savings and efficiencies from utilizing COTS. What makes COTS
applicable for Governments? Basically three things: Committed use of Open Standards,
Inclusion of Best Practice and Establishing an Ecosystem of Future Solution Influencers.
8
Accenture/Oracle Whitepaper, Examining the Total Cost of Ownership for Social Service Case Management.
24. Social Services and “the Cloud”
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Open Standards
We believe that ICT should be interoperable. Hence we use Open Standards and de-facto
industry standards, as a fundamental design parameter in our solutions. This enables us to
quickly put together solutions that can adhere to existing system investments and co-exist – or
even enable easier future integration and interoperability with Oracle and 3rd party
components in the Enterprise Architecture. The use of Open Standards reduces risks and
maximizes the value of the overall system environment.
Learn from others – use good practices
We strongly believe that sharing and including as much knowledge from the ecosystem when
we do solution development is the only way forward. We thus interlink our own industry experts
with customers, partners and international organizations to gain insight and business
knowledge of how the functionality of social service of tomorrow would look like. Which
business requirements are needed to support social service organizations and to make them
perform as best as possible? Which requirements are expected to be demanded from the
citizens on the user interface of self-service enablement?
Ecosystem for Influencers.
Oracle believes that we have some of the most talented and innovative ICT-people who
together with staff from acquisition of new technologies (their inventors), will continue to
provide the best and most innovative solutions for Governments. But we reject sitting in the
ivory tower and think we know everything. We don’t.
25. Social Services and “the Cloud”
23
This is why we have established a clear governance model for future identification and solving
new business issues in the public sector with ICT, involving a full range of stakeholders in a
virtual ecosystem as visualized in the figure below.
OracleIndustryExpertise
Examine trends and
directions
Act as bridge between
coding and
specification of
functionalities
Conduct Strategy
Management &
Industry Insights.
Partners/Sys.Integrators
Have hands on
experience –
understand the
integration
complexities
Combining
Management
Consulting and
Implementation
PublicSectorClients
Asks for new
functionality across
products.
Requests
enhancements,
integrations and
functionalities
Share thoughts,
visions, experiences
through Client
Advisory Board
InternationalStakeholders
Collection of best /
good practise
Dialog and influence
on technical
committees and
bodies.
Dialog and
collaboration with
organizations like ISSA
and WAPES – for
sharing strategies and
outcomes.
26. Social Services and “the Cloud”
24
Conclusion
Public Sector is a key business area for Oracle. And hence we are committed to continue to
innovate and assist Public Sector execution. With Oracle Governments and Social Service
agencies gets a partner that can help with digitalization across all ICT disciplines – from
operation of infrastructure either as on premise or as a cloud offering to designing the
componentized enterprise functional architecture for next generation social security system
utilizing existing in-house components combined with state-of-the-art IaaS, Paas, and SaaS
cloud services.
Using a platform from Oracle provide flexibility and protects existing investments. Our key
elements – on which we build all public sector specific solutions – from Child Welfare in
Denmark and Australia, over Social Security in the Netherlands and Morocco to Elder and
Handicap Care in Sweden and Spain – is Rules and Policy Enablement, Case Management,
Business Intelligence, Web-front-end and Interoperable Business Process Backend and
Integration layer (Middleware) knitted together with strong enterprise resource planning
capabilities delivered either on premise or in the cloud – or in a hybrid deployment model.
At Oracle we believe that COTS is the best way forward to create systems that match business
needs, and citizens demand with reliable and fast-changeable ICT. We believe that industry
specific solution can be build by standard-software utilizing a strong Enterprise Architecture. If
people want to build a bespoke system or base it on in-house Open Source development – or
will customize / adapt an existing system to your needs, you ought to ask for a second opinion.
We believe that our Social Service Lifecycle Value Approach combined with our Social Service
Enterprise Architecture componentized model (CEFA), makes a solid foundation for next
generation of platforms for Social Services Delivery. And as said – the platform and the
architecture is not a “buy everything”, there are multiple starting points – if the old mainframe
systems can’t cope anymore, a Platform Modernization starting point would be optimal – if
politicians complaint on long implementation time for new legislation, the “Closed Loop Policy
Modernization” might be a good starting point etc.
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Oracle and Public Sector
We can proudly state that Public Sector is among the most important industries for Oracle – in
fact, our customer number 1 more than 30 years ago was a public sector customer seeking
state-of-the-art database technology. Since then Oracle has become one of the most
successful providers of business solutions for Public Sector, continuously adding functionality
and capability to the solutions for Public Sector.
Our aim is to provide platforms on which public sector organizations can build their back- and
front-office operations. These platforms are orchestrated using functional requirements forming
a strong business enterprise architecture, which incorporate a high number of the innovations
and investments that Oracle have been doing over the last 5-7 years. Our list of references in
Public Sector and Social Service is vast – we have been involved in building next generation
solutions several places around the world – and we have deployed hardware, databases,
middleware and applications together or as individual products.
Like with all our customers we try to listen and learn from public sector and we transform our
solutions to public sector needs through a number of interactions with Public Sector. Our goal
is to become the preferred platform for Public Sector digitalization. As part of our continued
commitment to Public Sector we seek your guidance, insight and advice. As we continue to
develop and invest in technologies that can empower the citizens in self-service, reduce fraud
and error or make public sector policy orchestration more smooth and efficient, we interact with
international forums and organizations (like ISSA and WAPES), and partners and customers
as well as academics and other peers knowledgeable of the transformation and digitalization of
public sector.
