Applying the ISO RM-ODP Standard in E-Government

During the last years, governmental organizations have invested considerable effort and financial resources in the development and adoption of egovernment services. In order to sustain the quality of their services, governmental organizations need to solve the problem of efficient and secure electronic exchange and processing of governmental documents and data. A major difficulty in this distributed deployment is the fact that these interconnected systems are heterogeneous and they may operate in multiple organisational domains. This paper demonstrates how the ISO/RM-ODP standard offers a general framework to design and develop an open distributed system attuned to egovernment environments. This is subsequently supported by a high level case study of how this standard can be applied in the case of a system designed for small to medium sized European municipalities.