Integrating the various silos across government is something every government technologist deals with at one time or another. Agencies throughout Chaoyang District government have long recognized the value of deploying IT solutions to improve the efficiency of government departments and to meet the needs of other users requiring governmental information. However, the applications often were developed and deployed based on agency-specific business needs. The heterogeneous mix of solutions made it difficult to access and integrate data from across different agencies and departments of the district government.
As the district government moved toward a centralized solution for integrating data and providing secure yet ready access to information to individuals, businesses, and government entities, the IT group needed to find the best platform for developing and deploying an information-sharing e-government portal. At the same time, the IT group needed to ensure that its solution would help control costs, while improving flexibility and scalability. The district government needed to reduce the cost of resource integration and data management, while improving resource utilization.
Beijing’s Chaoyang District government decided to create its new e-government platform using the Microsoft Application Platform and a service-oriented architecture (SOA) design. The result is an integrated e-government portal solution that provides unified data exchange services across agencies, as well as data storage services.
The e-government portal enables the district government to provide more information and data for citizens, businesses, and other governmental entities. Within Chaoyang District government, the solution has been used for a range of purposes including bringing together information from across agencies to provide a better view into overall district operations. The solution provides a wealth of information ranging from precise economic statistics, to general decision-support guidance.
The Chaoyang District government solution is based upon a multi-tier architecture that when fully deployed will include:
ETL Tier. Information from applications deployed in different agencies and departments is consolidated using SQL Server 2008 Integration Services to perform extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes.
Database Tier. Relational data that is imported from applications and data stores for the e-government solution is stored using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise database software. In a future phase information from throughout the district government’s department and agency applications and data stores will be unified in a data warehouse hosted on SQL Server 2008 Enterprise.
Application Tier. The SOA-based application was created using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0. The application uses Web services and takes advantage of Microsoft support for XML, SOAP, LDAP and other industry standards to support data exchange, workflow management, information searches, data subscriptions, and other solution elements.
Integration Tier. A middleware integration and orchestration layer to enable information exchange between otherwise disparate solutions was created using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 Enterprise.
Presentation Tier. Users of the e-government solution access the site using a browser, avoiding the need for downloading client-side applications. The presentation tier uses Window Server 2008 Enterprise Internet Information Services 7.0 Web server technology, and uses Windows Server 2008 Network Load Balancing to dynamically distribute traffic across servers.
Portal. Information is accessed through the e-government portal which was created using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2009. Windows Server 2008 Active Directory is used to support role-based access to information.
More details can be found here