Description

1.           Introduction

Presently the eGovernment development trend across the globe focuses primarily on interoperable connected government to enhance government efficiency and transparency with increased citizen participation through the online service delivery of basic citizen services.

In line with this global trend, the OECS governments have started working towards creating an open, transparent, interoperable environment to help government information systems work successfully together and in an integrated and seamless manner regardless of the underlying technology or application.

Towards this objective, the first version of the OECS eGovernment Interoperability Framework (eGIF) has been drafted in this report. A Government Interoperability Framework (GIF) is a set of standards and guidelines that a government uses to specify the preferred way that its agencies, citizens and partners interact with each other.

This proposed eGIF is expected to deliver the following benefits:

• Enable proprietary and open source systems in different Government information systems, both within Government and external to Government, to communicate and inter-operate efficiently and effectively through seamless information flow across government / public service organisations;
• Promote and foster the adoption of open source solutions within the Government, by emphasizing the need for openness, transparency and competitiveness for all implementations of information systems;
• Promote and foster the adoption of open standards that enables the exchange of data between applications;
• Promote vendor-neutral and technology-neutral implementations, with the adoption of open standards, for all Government information systems; and
• Reduce the total cost of ownership of Government information systems, with the adoption of open standards.