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/ e-Government Program (Yesser)NEA - Technical Reference Model
Document Description
Document TitleTechnical Reference Model
Document version1.0
Document StatusDraft
AuthorNEA Team
NEA DecisionUnder Review
Versioning
Version / Date / Description of changes made0.1 / 7/1/2013 / Draft document
0.2 / 9/9/2013 / Initial draft
1.0 / 21/5/2014 / Final Draft
Document Validation
Version / Authors / Review by / Date / Status0.1 / MuhammedYaseen / Draft
0.2 / Mohammed A. Al-Barrak / Draft
1.0 / Mohammed A. Al-Barrak / 21/05/2014 / Final Draft
References
S/No / Description & Location1 / FEA – Federal Enterprise architecture/
2 / Australian Government Architecture reference models/
3 / TOGAF® 9.1/
4 / U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs – TRM/
5 / Building a Tangible TRM/
6 / Shaw, Robert, Computer Aided Marketing & Selling (1991) Butterworth Heinemann
7 / "GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS AS AN INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY: CONTEXT, CONCEPTS, AND DEFINITIONS". ESRI. RETRIEVED 9 JUNE 2011.
Table of Contents
1.Introduction
2.Value of TRM
3.Goals of TRM
4.TRM Structure
4.1.TRM Overview
4.2.TRM Service explanation:
Table of Figures
Figure 1 TRM Structure
Figure 2 : Information System Service Use and Offering
Figure 3 Service Access and delivery service area
Figure 4 Service Platform and Infrastructure service area
Figure 5: Component Framework service area
Figure 6 Service Interface and Integration Area
1.Introduction
The Technical Reference Model (TRM) (Figure 1) is a component-driven, technical framework categorizing the standards and technologies to support and enable the delivery of Service Components and capabilities. The framework will also enable the unification across government agencies and whole-of-government guidance by providing a foundation to asserts and spurs the re-use and standardization of technology and Service Components from a government-wide perspective.
The scope of the TRM is wide-ranging,as it may be applied within a single agency, within a government sector or within multiple of government agencies.
The following (Figure 1)depicts the core components that are defined for the TRM in order to enabling the ability for categorizing, unifying and standardizing technological components:
Figure 1TRM Structure
As it is depicted above, the TRM structure is hierarchically organized to facilitate categorizing standards and technologies that all togetherenable the secure delivery, exchange and implementation of business and application Service Components that may be used and leveraged in a component-based or service-oriented architecture. The structure is consisted of the following major blocks:
Service Area:represent a technical tier supporting the secure construction, exchange, and delivery of Service Components. Each Service Area consists of multiple Service Categories and Service Standards.
Service Category: assemble lower levels of technologies and standards with having similaraspects ofbusiness or technology function they serve.
Service Standard: define the standards and technologies that belong to a Service Category.
2.Value of TRM
The TRM can provide values for both government agencies independently and across government agencies from a government-wide perspective.
The major value of the TRM appears in the traceability by mapping the standards and technologies with IT investment, and this is will enable of measuring and evaluating the achievements and usability of the technologies and standards at the level of government agency.In addition, aligning agency capital investments to the TRM will leverages a common, standardized vocabulary that facilitates interagency discovery, collaboration, and interoperability.
Furthermore, the TRM allows the traceability with other known reference model such as business reference model which enable measuring/demonstrating the importance and the usability of each technology and standard. For example: KPIs from the performance modelmapped to a specific service standards in the TRM offers additional insight for managers in terms of feasibility, cost.
In addition, the TRM standards’ profiles are rich with technical details such as technology’s maturity, product’s information, and technology age, which will help IT peopleto handle technology life-cycle more accurately. Theywill easily decide whether relevant technology should keep being used, updated or discarded by periodically analysis its properties. The technical details for standards can also be utilized to classify their characteristics, and this will easily help to find reusable components, or to find opportunity’s to combine systems into one to reduce costs and efforts.
Finally, the structural and simpler design of the TRM will benefit the government from economies of scale by identifying reusable solutions and best technological components from different agencies and propose it to other agencies to support their business and save budget and effort in national level.
3.Goals of TRM
The TRM can accelerate enterprise and joint action around new opportunities afforded by standardized approaches for accomplishing goals such as the following:
Enabling increased visibility and availability and traceability of technologies and solutions across government agencies.
Fostering increased information sharingacross government agencies to boost the concept of reusability and openness.
Establishing the base of common information technology language across government agencies by defining and classifying the whole information technology components in standardized structure that facilitate communications across IT department of government agencies.
4.TRM Structure
4.1.TRM Overview
NEA TRM is based on U.S Fedral Government TRM and then reflected with the Saudi government agencies environment. This reflection was to simplify and abstract the model to make a better utilization and realization of the value. The following table represents the high level outlines of the TRM:
Service Area / Service CategoriesService Access and Delivery / Access Channels
Delivery Channels
Service Requirements
Service Transport
Service Platform and Infrastructure / Support Platforms
Delivery Servers
Software Engineering
Databases/Storage
Hardware/Infrastructure
Component Framework / Security
Presentation/Interface
Programming
Data Interchange
Data Management
Service Interface and Integration / Integration
Interoperability
Interface
The following diagram can simply visualize the way that a user interacts with government agency’s systems, which is exactly reflecting the TRM method of classifying technological components, HW, and SW.
Figure 2 : Information System Service Use and Offering
From the diagram, It can be seen that all systems have external user who directly interact and make use of it. Also, these systems are linked to so many other internal HW/SW components. The relation between these three major entities, user, customer facing system/service and internal components, is as the following:
- External users or systems use the customer facing system through access unit, networkaccess, interface, etc.
- The customer facing system, which offer services, realize and provide services by utilizing various technologies such as programming, user interface, security, data technology, etc.
4.2.TRM Service explanation:
Service Access and Delivery Service Area
This area (Figure 2) defines the collection of Access and Delivery Channels that will be used to enable the access of the Service Component, and the legislative requirements that govern its use and interaction
Figure 3Service Access and delivery service area
In the following tables, there are full elaborations of this service area along with identifying its categories. In addition, there is variety of examples provided to assist in clarifying each service standards. Agencies should consult whole of government policies, frameworks and standards together with their agency SOE to determine product requirements.
Access Channels:
Access channels define any medium that enable users of accessing applications/services.
Service Standard / Define By / ExamplesWeb Browser / The program that serves asyour front end to the World Wide Web on the Internet.In order to view a site, you type its address (URL) into the browser's location field. / Microsoft IE, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome.
Mobile Devices / The devices that usetransmission via the airwaves and enable user to access application through display screen with touchinput and/or a miniature keyboard. / Smart phones, Tablets.
Collaboration / Communications / The forms of electronic exchange of messages, documents or other information. Electronic communication provides efficiency through expedited time of delivery. /
- Social networking services such as: Facebook, twitter, Youtube.
- Short message service (SMS)
- Interactive voice response (IVR): a telephonytechnology in which someone uses a touch-tone telephone to interact with a database to acquire information from or enter data into the database.
- Voice over internet protocol (VOIP).
- Electronic mail (email).
- Kiosk: a small physical structure (often including acomputer and a display screen) that displays information for people walking by. Kiosks are common in public buildings. Kiosks are also used at trade shows and professional conferences.
Telephony / Including phones and faxes.
Other Electronic Channels /
- System to system: which include at least two computers that communicate with each other directly and independent of human intervention in order to exchange data.
- Web services.
- Uniform resource locator (URL).
GSB Service / GSB is an entity that contains intermediary systems of integrated infrastructure components of hardware and software designed to activating the exchange of shared government data among agencies that are authorized to access the data in order to deliver their respective e-Government services in an accurate, speedy and safe manner
Delivery Channels
Delivery channels define the type of network that used in order to access applications, services and systems.
Service Standard / Define By / ExamplesInternet
Intranet / Acomputer networkthat usesinternet protocol technology to share information, operational systems, or computing services within an organization.
Extranet / The private network that uses the Internet protocol and the publictelecommunication system to securely share part of a business's information or operations with any external parties like suppliers, vendors, partners, customers or other businesses.
Peer to Peer (P2P) / The class of applications that operate outside the Domain Name System (DNS), have significant or total autonomy from central servers and take advantage of resources available on the Internet.
GSN / Government Secure Network
Virtual Private Network (VPN) / The use of the public telecommunication infrastructure, maintaining privacy through the use of a tunnelling protocol and security procedures.
Service Requirements
Service requirements define the necessary aspects and prerequisites of an application, system or service including legislation, performance and hosting aspects.
Service Standard / Define By / ExamplesLegislation / Compliance / The prerequisites that an application, system or service must have, as mandated by the Saudi Government or any other authorized governing bodies. /
- Customization and bespoke development: refers to the MCITCustomization and Bespoke Development Policy, which mandates specific requirements that agencies must follow when they customize or bespoke development software.
- Open source
- IPv6
- Security
Authentication / Single Sign-on (SSO) / The method that provides users with the ability to login one time, getting authenticated access to more than one application and resources.
Hosting / The service provider who manages and provides storage space, access and availability to a website or application, often bound to a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The Hosting entity generally maintains a server farm with network support, power backup, fault tolerance, load balancing and storage backup.
Service Transport
Service transport defines the end-to-end management of the communications session to include the access and delivery protocols.
Service Standard / Define By / ExamplesSupporting Network
Services / The supporting protocols that define the format and structure of data and information that is either accessed from a directory or exchanged through communications. /
- Internet Message Access Protocol/Post Office.
- Protocol (IMAP/POP3).
- Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).
- Extended Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (ESMTP).
- Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).
- Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).
- Directory Services.
- Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP).
- Domain Name System (DNS).
- Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).
Service Transport / The core protocols that define the format and structure of data and information that is either accessed from a directory or exchanged through communications. /
- Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).
- Internet Protocol (IP).
- Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
- Wireless Application Protocol (WAP).
- File Transfer Protocol (FTP).
- IP Security (IPSEC).
Service Platform and Infrastructure Service Area
The Service Platform and Infrastructure Service Area (Figure 3) define the collection of platforms, hardware and infrastructure standards that enable Component Based Architectures and Service Component re-use.
Figure 4 Service Platform and Infrastructure service area
In the following tables, there are full elaborations of this service area along with identifying its categories. In addition, there is variety of examples provided to assist in clarifying each service standards. Agencies should consult whole of government policies, frameworks and standards together with their agency SOE to determine product requirements.
Support Platforms
Support platforms refer to hardware and software architectures. This service area is to list the standard platforms with considering their dependencies to any operating systems.
Service Standard / Define By / ExamplesWireless/Mobile / The radio transmission via the airwaves.Various communications techniques are used to provide wireless transmission including infrared ‘line of sight’, cellular, microwave, satellite, packet radio and broad spectrum. / Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME).
Platform Independent / The definition of the platforms which are able to execute and run on any operating systems. A platform is consisted of the underlying hardware and software comprising a system. / Hypervisor, Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE), Linux, Eclipse.
Platform Dependent / The description of the platformswhich are able to execute and run on a specific operating systems. A platform is the underlying hardware and software comprising a system. / Windows, Mac OS, Net.
Delivery Servers
Delivery Servers are front-end platforms that provide information to a requesting application. It includes the hardware, operating system, server software and networking protocols. Front-end platforms’ functionalities stop when it engages with the back-end or client management using service integration.
Service Standard / Define By / ExamplesWeb Servers / The computer that provides world wide web services on the Internet. It includes the hardware, operating system, web server software, TCP/IP protocols and the website content (web pages). /
- Apache.
- Internet Information Server.
Media Servers / The provision of optimized management of media- based files such as audio and video streams and digital images. /
- Real Audio.
- Windows Media Services.
Application Servers / In an n-tier environment, a separate computer (application server) performs the business logic, although some part may still be handled by the user's machine. Business Rules Engine are software systems that executes one or more business rules in a runtime production environment. /
- IBM’s WebSphere Application Server.
- Oracle Application Server
Portal Servers / Focus points for interaction,
providing integration and
single source corporate
information.
Software Engineering
Software engineering defines platforms associated with building software systems, as well as technical solutions that handle management issues such as testing, modeling and versioning.
Service Standard / Define By / ExamplesIntegrated Development Environment (IDE) / The combination of hardware, software and technology that facilitate the development of software applications and systems. /
- Rational Application Developer.
- VS.Net
Software Configuration Management / Systems related to all aspects of software development which controlled and managed by the software development lifecycle methodology starting from design to delivery, specifically focused on the control of all work products and artifacts generated during the development process. /
- Version management: refers to tracking and controlling versions of files. Version Management includes capabilities such as labelling, branching, merging, version content comparisons and security and permission management across version controlled projects
- Defect tracking: refers to the identification, assignment and management of discovered defects within an application, product or solution. Defect tracking tools provide searchable defect data to identify urgent and related defects or bugs. The architecture should be built to facilitate the pushing of software patches across the enterprise.
- Issue management: refers to the management of business, technical and infrastructure issues throughout the entire life-cycle of a project.
- Task management.
- Deployment management.
- Change management.
- Deployment management.
- Requirements management and traceability.
Test Management / Systems support management and consolidation of all testing activities and results. Test Management activities include test planning, designing (test cases), execution, reporting, code coverage and heuristic and harness development.
Modeling / The provision of support for the process of representing entities, data, business logic and capabilities for aiding in software engineering. /
- Unified Modelling Language (UML)
- Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) software
Database/Storage
Database/storage refers to programs that enable storing, modifying and extracting of information from a database, and various techniques and devices/hardware for storing large amounts of data.