Business and Technical Solution

Different government organizations have already developed software to digitalize their information and data in isolated ways that are not interoperable for use by other organizations, causing huge monetary involvement to prepare the same information and data. The National e-Service Bus will remove this duplicity and will provide seamless data flow between organizations. The National e-Service Bus, to facilitate citizen service delivery, is a crucial part of the BNDA framework.

Electronic services, or e-services, are a critical component for establishing e-Government. All government entities under the Digital Bangladesh vision are currently engaged in providing e-services to the citizens and businesses. E-services are the final outcome from the BNDA. E-services would include G2G, G2C, G2B, or Government-to-Employee (G2E). However, the data exchange, interoperability between e-services and other Government of Bangladesh agencies, data centers, and third-party systems require complex integration and orchestration to deliver required data. The National e-Service Bus plays a key role.

Due procedures and guidelines have been established around the governance to ensure robust and standardized controls are being followed by the BNDA working team.

What is the National e-Service Bus?

The National e-Service Bus is a software-driven middleware platform, which is being developed to enable online services, sharing of information and data of ministries, departments, and directorates to ensure interoperability and an end user’s easy access to it. The National e-Service Bus is connected/integrated with various government databases and systems. The National e-Service Bus acts as a hub for foundation building block services (such as the citizen authentication service, birth registration verification service, and mobile number validation service, etc.) of the BNDA architecture as-a-whole. The online system is deployed in a clustered and load-balancing environment of the National Data Center (NDC) to ensure its scalability and 24/seven availability.

This is a critical component in the interoperability architecture domain and is key to ensuring the seamless exchange of information and services for the Government of Bangladesh. It is a conduit for channeling and routing information requests to and from various government agencies. The National e-Service Bus is based on an SOA paradigm. It is a gateway for accessing government data repositories such as the National Identity (NID), the Birth and Death Registration System, Government Employee Database, etc., and acts as a translator between different systems.

A project management plan was prepared and finalized following standard project management practices. An architecture review and compliance check were addressed as part of the project governance. This was followed by requirements of gathering, consolidation, analysis, clarifying expectation details from senior management, brainstorming sessions, and depicting probable scenarios/use-cases, etc. The test engineer started to prepare a test plan and test cases for testing the system exhaustively. The target system design and integration architecture were prepared, reviewed with stakeholders, and the timeline was adjusted accordingly, based on skilled resources across participating systems of engagement and systems of record. System and integration testing was conducted as per the plan, and bugs/defects identified from testing were addressed by the deployment team before piloting.

The system implementation plan and design were executed using an iterative stakeholder feedback mechanism, architecture review, and architecture requirements. The National e-Service Bus was piloted for four to five months. Based on user experience, operational experiences, and stakeholder feedback, the system was upgraded/modified and taken to live operation in June 2017.

The system deployment was accomplished in line with the BNDA Technology Architecture guidelines. The Apache^® web server and Tomcat^® container were selected as they implement Open Standards. The NDC’s infrastructure and virtualized environment was used to align with the “shared use of resources” principle. To align with security architecture standards, it is deployed in a private Local Area Network (LAN) of an NDC, as it does not have any public interface and it sits in the middle during data exchange among applications/services.

The project review process:

The BNDA Application Architecture allows several integration components to enable citizen services, e-services, and government application systems to connect and exchange data and information when required.^[1] Best practices of modern and futuristic reference architecture recommend loosely-coupled architecture. The National e-Service Bus supports loosely-coupled architecture and supports the TOGAF Standard reference architecture.

The national Enterprise Architecture and its components are developed based on the principle of standardization and simplification shown below:

The National e-Service Bus was based on the following two primary Architecture Principles:

Table 1: Two Key Architecture Decisions

The Service Bus Ecosystem is deployed as a private server inside the NDC network. It has a one-to-one integration with each provider and consumer. With a single integration consumers get all sorts of government services in a similar manner to build their systems over it. The BCC expects the Application Programming Interface (API) from the system/database owner organization. The API can be either Representational State Transfer (RESTful) web service or Simple Objects Access Protocol (SOAP) format. The system/database owner will be responsible to develop and maintain the API.

Core Features of the National e-Service Bus