Adopting SOA in Public Service Provision

Ensuring accessibility of utility and social services is one of the public obligations of governments. Today, nations make use of the notion of e-government to expose such services to citizens. In line with this, many public organizations in Ethiopia are automating their workflows, and the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT) is attempting to unify certain services as part of its e-government initiative. However, the architectural patterns in use generally lack the required flexibility, and scalability for future expansion needs and business models with respect to the option that latest technologies such as SOA can offer. Literature shows that the loosely-coupled nature of SOA addresses the above-mentioned limitations and many e-government initiatives are exploiting its potential. Thus, it is apparent that SOA can address the e-government needs in Ethiopia too. In this paper, we conducted an SOA e-readiness assessment against the available e-readiness frameworks and found out that the infrastructural, legal, government, customer, and human resource requirements are met. Thus, we recommend that SOA be applied to incrementally and loosely integrate the existing (and upcoming) systems and realize “ubiquitous” public service provision.