After the Tunisian revolution I was glad to see active Facebook pages for some ministries, but I was annoyed when I saw some Facebook applications implemented as services by these ministries. I’m not against these applications or against using Facebook platform, however I believe that our country need a serious e-Government plan with five key objectives :

• Transparency
• Flexibility
• Services
• Efficiency
• Follow-up

Today I’m pleased to announce the first public release of this paper. Anyone on Internet can find, view and edit, so you are welcome to voice your opinions and contribute. Released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Of course you are welcome to edit anonymously, however I suggest you to use your Google Account to give you credits for contribution.

Tunisia 2.0 and e-Government, Strategies and Tactics, public draft paper is available here (Google Document, No sign-in required)

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The key feature in DMS, ECM, or e-Archiving solutions is the “Document” itself. It’s all about creating documents and retrieving them, everything else is built on this feature : security, workflow, search and index, backup, restore, encryption … etc.

The NoSQL movement have the answer for most ECM implementations since it’s mainly about key/value data store, where you can mainly store documents (of data) and retrieve them.

In a NoSQL environment there is no lock, so your ECM is highly available, scalable, and replicated across your system. What else are we looking for ? Oh yes consistency !

The “eventually consistent” is probably the only negative point for adopting NoSQL against the “enforced consistency” of RDBMS. In the same time you cannot easily distribute RDBMS and scale it horizontally, which is more fun to do in NoSQL.

DMS of the future will need to adopt NoSQL  :

• because new systems are built for Internet : highly available documents is required feature, imagine a place where everybody can really write simultaneously – no locks-in.
• If you request a specific document, you will get it and there is no difference here with RDBMS, noSQL is even more performing.
• The “eventually consistent” will not really change anything, when you need a global view of the data (stats for example) you will get it “consistent”.
• Backup of documents could be done easily – and you will fall in love with replication
• Sharding is your friend for large distributed database of documents

I won’t need to mention successful case studies, because most cases are trying to replace RDBMS for relational databases, while DMS is mainly about documents. Using NoSQL database coupled with an RDBMS could also be a great alternative to provide additional features for documents management.

Lots of great NoSQL implementation already available such as CouchDB, MongoDB, BerkleyDB, Neo4j, Memcachedb, Tokyo Cabinet, BigTable, Redis, … etc. and not a single DMS or e-Archiving initiative to adopt NoSQL ?

IBM Filenet, OpenText, LaserFiche, and all other companies working in the ECM, DMS, e-Archiving business should be worried, the future will be Not Only for them.

Update : as Alex mentioned on myNoSQL Magazine, and to avoid confusion, I don’t support NoSQL for content management in general, however ECM is mentioned here as it usually support document management, assets management, … etc.

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Without entering into further details, how this could happen, and why … It’s true that something wrong happened and they assumed the consequences. I’m not talking about the small amount of money they paid to get back the password, but about the scam behind it and the name of the university in question.

I wanted to profit – as usual – and focus again on the strategic decisions of considering Open source as alternative in critical mission projects. Whatever if you are talking about ERP, CRM, BPM, DMS, … the open source alternative is always available and costless compared to proprietary solutions. Best of all, open source is a guarantee to have full control on the business and get lock-free solution.

Imagine if this project was made in an open source ecosystem, the university will never get locks anywhere, and their system might be updated easily and quickly – even if something wrong happened.

Most important things to consider to avoid locks :

• Adopt Open Source technologies
• Document everything : Business, communications, code and databases
• Adopt a backup/restore strategy
• Adopt a disaster recovery strategy
• Share the knowledge in a development team, and avoid using only one developer in a large project to minimize cost. Two or more developers will get work done faster and safer.
• Separate critical mission projects, from new alpha/beta projects. Use SOA as much as possible for integration.
• Do not go e-Business if you are not ready for it and always provide alternative in case of failure. And consider seriously that the project will fail.
• finally -in Saudi Arabia specifically- ask for support, Yesser program is doing great work and their consultants might really help to secure your e-Business.

You still don’t trust open source ?

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I’m not going to defend open source, because there are enough arguments, technologies, and solutions that are very competitive and no closed technology can compete with them, however my only take is only for education.

Why most education systems “impose” the use of proprietary solutions ? I did not said that MS Office is bad, but do not force me to use this product. Why teaching kids how to use Windows, Word, Excel, PowerPoint… then Access for advanced users !

As a student I’ll have probably to write text, reports, table sheets, presentations … I don’t think this deserve to be taught separately and marked in the final exams ! People behind education programs are sometimes old fashion and love to stick to old stuff they learned, or just prefer the solution of facility if it’s about teaching few basic features documented and sponsored by the software provider.

The only good things is probably teaching Java as main programming language in most universities and colleges, and my apologies for those who are stick to Pascal “forever”. It’s okay to teach .NET but don’t stick to Visual Studio and Windows environment, there is Mono for people who don’t know it which provide an open source alternative.

In business, the choice of open or closed technology is not a matter of evangelism. I had the chance probably to work on a large open source solution using a closed source database for a government institution, and actually another new project which is based mainly on closed technology and integrated with the open source solution.

The core business solution is stable for one year already, and is mainly powered by open source technologies (operating systems, web server, web application), even the closed source database is running on an open source OS.

Getting the new project running with closed technology doesn’t much matter for me – even if I won’t recommend it if I was asked before. Making the business evolute is my only concern, and integration was really made easy between the two technologies.

My only worries today is about the capabilities of the closed technology to support a high number of users, and high traffic during peak times. In the same time I’m not much worried, because the core business is in the safe side, if the new implementation for a reason or another fail, only the “closed source” part of the system will fail and not the entire system.

Businesses and consultancies have the choice, most of the time, but they are mostly interested to work behind a giant company name to make sure that their solution will be accepted. By experience selling a custom made solution (powered by open source technologies) is much more profitable than reselling licenses of any available software, but the lack of experience and confidence doesn’t give much choices.

I think I have answered a key question here : small companies cannot compete with open source software, get behind a large company name and you will be able to sell any open source solution at a very competitive price compared to closed source one. Open and closed source are not enemies, it’s up to you to use one or the other, or make them both coexist.

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From yesser website, YEFI is defined as “a unified framework to implement e-government. It includes cross – governmental specifications and policies, to enable cross – governmental integration and facilitate G2G transactions and data sharing.”

While reading deeply about YEFI, I noticed that the framework cover almost everything we need – for integration purpose at least – between different government institutions. The common part of the schemas between different ministries is almost the same : Address, ID number, place & date of birth, Last and first name, while they keep different names.

The creation of data catalog is the first step to get these data defined, where every entry should include as fields : Name, Business information, Format, Validation, Verification, XML Schema IDs, Values, Default value, Owner, Version and Acceptance date. The data schema will be in this case the collection of all these elements defined in data catalog.

The schema should include meta data; if we are sending person’s data for example the schema should start with meta data as : Business object created, Business object updated, owner, data schema ID, Global unique object ID; then followed by person data as : Person birth place & date, First & Last name … etc.

A central repository for the standardized schemas is required to handle persistent data of oudated schemas. As every institution data might evolve over the years, and data schema will be updated; a repository should be available to document schemas versions and conversion rules.

The recommended integration technologies standards are : WebServices for middleware, UTF-16 for character sets, XML/XSL and XML schema, and finally RDF as resource description framework.

More details on YEFI program and technical documentation are available at http://www.yesser.gov.sa/english/YEFI.asp

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Building e-Government services is not that hard, not that easy also. There are many steps that should be followed to be able – at a certain time – to move totally from an old paper-based system, to a fully electronic system.

The most interesting in e-Government that you are building services for people, and people are the customers, the users, while they usually never interact during the building process – but we have many considerations to keep in mind while building for people.

Some interesting steps in e-Gov creation where we should focus mainly include :

• Business Process Re-engineering
• e-Government system architecture
• Systems interoperability and scalability
• Security : systems, network, and end-users
• Cost consideration : hardware, software, network, development in-house, outsourcing, and management
• Web-enabling requirements : accessibility, usability, technologies standards
• Supporting Multiple Communication channels
• Internal software and hardware for administration (legacy systems) : RH, Finance, DMS, Archiving, CRM, Workflow, Communication (Email, Voice, IM)

It is interesting to turn Governments process into e-Services, but building platforms that support different business process levels G2G, G2B and G2C is much more interesting.

Some experts started talking about Government 2.0, or Government as Platform. A great concept especially since it allows anybody to build government services or integrate it with other already established business process elsewhere.

The problem is that building platforms is totally different from building services, and IT developers/architects used to create web applications that do not scale at the Government level. One of these problems is the execution of the CAP theorem in Governments web applications. The fact that we require “strong consistency” in e-Government is a major limitation for high availability in web platforms.

“eventual consistency is an  eventual solution, but implement it correctly is a major obstacle. The reason why developers/architects have to better understand the best practices for building eventually consistent systems, in highly available environments.

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Using windows as terminal for a web application is not a problem, but problems start when you have different version of windows and Internet explorer here and there, but especially when we deal with other devices like printers or barcode readers.

One of these issues is completely strange and personally I couldn’t explain the reason why when a user change a printer, the web page margins change ! Some employees have more than one printer available for common A4 printing tasks, barcode printing … etc. So it’s annoying to fix margins – even from registry – and then seeing these values changing for every printer – randomly !

There is always a solution, and for this problem specifically  I wrote an activex script that reset page margins before printing anything. It worked fine, in addition to another script that deploy some IE settings to all clients in the network through active directory.

But seriously, can someone explain why when a user change printer, the web page margins change ?

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