Sukhmani, a watershed in the history of e-Governance in Punjab has transformed how citizen services are offered. It is not just a technology project but one that encompasses reengineering of business processes to create innovative solutions that offer integrated citizen services under one roof. That is not all, the Government’s dream of a realizing an efficient, transparent, convenient and friendly interaction with the citizens is now possible in the first Citizen Service Center in Ludhiana District.
The entire project was conceived and executed with the help of Microsoft Consulting Services. The Business Process Reengineering study revealed that a good mix of offline and online delivery methods will help improve the government-to-citizen interaction. In the first phase of the project, Sukhmani Centres provide the offline delivery while Internet and SMS would be used to offer the services online.
In the first phase, MCS has developed and deployed an integrated solution for payment of water bills, electricity bills and house tax. The roadmap is to have Sukhmani as the citizen gateway for over 120 services provided by the government.
Government of Punjab has realized the potential of Information Technology for SMART (Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsive and Transparent) governance. E-governance would have far reaching effects in key areas of government functions, e.g. information dissemination, approvals, transactions, and grievance redressal.
With a view to offer an integrated set of services to the citizens, the Sukhmani Society for Citizen Services was created. Sukhmani service centres would offer citizen services pertaining to all departments under-one-roof.
Sukhmani Society is a district level body that would work under the overall umbrella framework of Punjab State E-Governance Society (PSEGS), a state level body headed by the Chief Secretary, Punjab. All the service centers in the district would be established, managed and run by the Sukhmani Society of that district on a self sustaining revenue model.
Business Process Reengineering – Improving Government – Citizen Interaction
Early into the project, it was realized that Sukhmani would be more than a technology integration project. It would serve as an agent for change and would help and encourage Business Process Reengineering (BPR) throughout all departments; Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) suggested a mix of offline and online means to deliver the citizen services.
The offline solution primarily included Sukhmani Service Centres, but in addition, MCS suggested setting up of low cost options such as drop boxes, internet and SMS. This would increase 24 X 7 accessibility for the consumers. In addition to this, self-service kiosks and Banking ATM interfaces would help reduce dependence on fulltime personnel.
To ensure that services were handled in a timely manner, the report forecast response times and suggested that all parties involved should sign Service Level Agreement (SLAs) detailing performance with regards to different service metrics like clearance time, average on-counter time, drop box clearance, collection frequency, unplanned and planned downtime etc.
The system has provisions to generate detailed SLA compliance statements based on which the performance of the various parties are met. For example, it is proposed that each year, the minimum bar on all SLA parameters be raised such that non-performing centers be easily identified and possibly merged with others to ensure profitability of the system. This would ensure that all the private players that set up the service centres continuously pay attention to the Quality of Service (QoS) offered rather than simply remaining on paper.
One of the results of the BPR was also the detailed business modeling of the centers which through the Ludhiana center has proved to be feasible in terms of being a self-sustaining business model which includes active participation from the private sector.
Solution Overview
The solution primarily has three components.
1. Wide Area Network
2. IT Infrastructure for the Service Centres
3. Applications to automate various services which can communicate asynchronously to a transaction gateway
The first component includes creating an Information Technology infrastructure to support this initiative. This would include a Wide Area Network (WAN) that connects the 120+ service centres planned to a central data center. The solution creates a Centralized Domain Administration. This would ensure easy integration with the State PKI server due to single domain, easy installation of application and network monitoring.
The second element is to create a cost effective, scalable IT infrastructure for the service centres which can be deployed quickly. “For private participation, we wanted to ensure that the service centre did not require a large investment. Both Microsoft and our studies have reported that the initial investment would be around Rs 10 lakh and the running cost would be approximately Rs 1.2 lakh. This ensures that ordinary citizens can set up a service centre and reap rich dividends,” explains Prabhjeet Singh, Systems manager, Department of IT.
The third and final piece of the solution was to create effective shrink-wrapped applications that can be quickly rolled out across the service centres. “Our aim is to add over 120 services and extend Sukhmani project across the state. To achieve this, we needed to ensure that the application deployment time should not exceed one week with the ability to add new services within a matter of weeks rather than months.” says Mr. N. S. Kalsi, IT Sect, Government of Punjab.
The Technology Architecture
Sukhmani is a distributed application. One of the core aims was to establish a very high degree of availability of the application. This meant that the citizen service centers had to be able to operate even at times when connectivity to the ecosystem was not available. Sukhmani thus relies on Microsoft message queuing technology to ensure continuity of operations with features such as transparent and guaranteed delivery of messages to the sukhmani gateway on resumption of connectivity.
Each element of the Sukhmani ecosystem communicates with each other via a secure Virtual Private Network established on the WAN. This allows Sukhmani to utilize existing connectivity at no risk to data privacy.
Being a distributed application, manageability of such a solution is always a concern. Typically, the network operations center may like to enforce policies such as application lockout, security policies, monitor operations, distribute patches from a central location. This single location administration is extremely important. Sukhmani uses a single statewide domain built on Windows Active Directory to manage, deploy patches and enforce security policies across all delivery channels not under its direct control.
Naturally, when it comes to a highly visible application such as Sukhmani, concerns about availability of the solution were kept foremost in mind. To accomplish this, Network Load Balancing Services which is part of the Windows Server System was used to ensure highest levels of performance and availability of the portal and gateway servers. Data was kept highly available through a SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Cluster.
Disaster Recovery is inbuilt in the system and a complete center can be rebuilt from scratch in a short period of time by simply joining the Sukhmani domain.
By utilizing concepts such as BPR, the Government of Punjab has been able to take corrective action in conjunction with implementation of e-Governance strategies and technologies.
BPR Helps Improve Government Processes
The BPR helped the government understand the inconsistencies in the system and find business and Information Technology solutions to fix the delays and deficiencies in the process.
With the help of Microsoft Consulting Services, the Department of Information Technology of Punjab has been able to create a viable and implementable framework for e-Governance. This is an important milestone as the business as well as technology foundation has been laid for successfully establish e-Governance in the state.
For the first time Government Departments and Societies sign SLAs
The concept of Service Level Agreements was fairly alien in the functioning of the government. For the first time, not only have all participating bodies signed on formal SLAs but the government departments also have committed themselves to maintaining the quality of Service as defined in the SLA.
Incentives and Disincentives help provide consistently provide good quality services
In a unique endeavour, the Government has created a system by which it hopes to weed out non-performing service centres and reward others that are exceeding the SLA. For example, the top five percent of the service centres will receive a bonus for stretch performance above and beyond a certain mark, followed by a smaller bonus for the next top 50% performing centers provided all benchmarks have been exceeded. Periodically, the bottom lot of the franchisees could be reviewed for deficiencies or in an extreme case be shut down to improve the efficiencies in the system.
Sukhmani creates an efficient, transparent government to citizen interaction
Having implemented electricity, water bills, phone and house tax payment through Sukhmani, the Government of Punjab is ready to expand the infrastructure beyond Ludhiana district as well as add more services. With services such as utility billing and issue of certificates such as Marriage, Death, SC, ST, acceptance of IT returns, VAT filing, Insurance payment etc. it will remove the dependence on touts and middlemen. This will lead to a cleaner and efficient interaction with the citizens
Cost effective, reliable and scalable IT infrastructure
The Sukhmani project is completely built on Microsoft technologies showcases the fact that large enterprise solutions that require the lowest total cost of ownership are best built on the Windows Server System.
Additionally, the infrastructure was deployed keeping in mind with extremely high uptime and manageability factors. Today, policies of the government with regards to Sukhmani can be deployed from a single point across the entire state thus vastly improving the manageability of the system. Additionally the infrastructure was designed keeping the most stringent requirements of reliability in mind. Microsoft .NET, the application services platform on which the solution was built promises very rapid functional and capacity scale out of the solution across 120 services and lakh of citizens across Punjab.
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