Leveraging Information Access in E-Government Using Mobile Services in Kenya Clement W. Marini Master in Technology Innovation and Development January 9, 2013
Abstract The purpose of this research paper is show the possibility of applying mobile web services using open source software. With the increase in the mobile penetration in Kenya, there is a need to provide access to the Government services in a cost effective and accessible manner. Effort and resources have been put in place to provide the services by the introduction of E-Government. This has however focused mainly on using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that is optimized for the personal computers (PCs) and other powerful computing devices. Nowadays, most of the mobile devices that the citizens have are characterized by limited resources such as processing power, memory, display screen and connection bandwidth. To address this I propose a mobile web services design that allows access to these services to these devices, allows easy inclusion of new and improvement to existing services and uses the available open source platform to achieve this. This research shows a mobile service (m-service) delivery platform that allows dynamic inclusion of other services without requiring the users to update their applications. Finally, it also shows how the same m-service can be adopted to be integrated with multiple presentation methods namely; short message services (SMS), unstructured supplementary services data (USSD), mobile web and user downloadable applications e.g. Java ME.
CHAPTER ONE Introduction to the study 1.0 INTRODUCTION The widespread use and adoption of mobile use of mobile devices in Kenya has opened doors for opportunities to deliver services direct to the handsets people. The handsets have different capabilities with some being able to leverage the internet to access data while others offer just voice and text. This is a great challenge in delivering services to serve these diverse devices. Due to this the focus on the Government has been to provide some of the services online by adopting web technologies to create websites and E- Government portals. While it has made it easier to access the information, it has not addressed the access of the same to people who are not computer literate yet they own and know how to effectively and efficiently operate a mobile phone. To provide services accessible to most people would require a cost effective and a standardized service across all the institutions accessible. In order to be cost effective, there are open source platforms that can be utilized to deliver in a secure and in real-time. These platforms have a huge community of developers and users who use them and they can also be adopted to fit into the process requirements of the institution. Web services will be used so as to provide a standard based approach to implementing the distributed architecture. They offer data and business logic services over standard protocols such as HTTP, XML, and SOAP over the internet. Gartner defines web services as loosely coupled software components delivered over internet-based technologies. The term Loosely coupled implies that web services are independent of any programming languages, platforms, and object models. Using the ubiquitous and low-cost internet, web services can easily provide interoperable software functions over the intranet and the Internet. Utilizing a web service will enable interface to legacy systems and other systems that are implemented in their own different platforms. The mobile web service will access information from these systems and provide and interface for use by SMS, USSD, Mobile web or installed applications on the devices.
2.0 PROBLEM STATEMENT The current services access setup is limited and has a bias towards high powered devices and more to the internet. The following are the major problems that this solution seeks to address: Most citizens have mobile devices with limited processing power, display size and not all have access to internet. This is higher penetration of mobile devices compared to personal computers. The discovery of mobile services to the user is complicated as all institutions serve them in different ways. Service delivery is slow especially in instances where it is served from a specific office. Some services are only available during normal working hours. Due to the above mentioned problems there is a need to provide a more centric, robust and cost effective solution to make access both easy and reliable. 3.0 RESEARCH OBJECTIVES The proposed mobile services solution is set to attain the following objectives both in the long run and short run. 1. To provide real-time access to information from the Government institutions. 2. To increase the capacity and enhance access by a variety of mobile devices. 3. To improve on service deliver time by providing a round the clock access to information. 4. To reduce development time and cost for new services by utilizing open source platforms. 5. To be inline with the Government vision 2030 for an information based economy. 4.0 SCOPE AND LIMITATIONS The study focuses on the adoption of mobile services architecture to increase the reach and improve service delivery from Government institutions. With the increasing availability of both high end and low cost phones there is a need to address the access to services across this diversification. The study offers an approach to how to deliver this solution.
CHAPTER TWO 1.1 LITERATURE REVIEW Thanks to the tremendous growth of mobile technology and accessibility to these devices, it is now possible to reach information to million of users. There has been a huge leap in growth in internet capacity especially within Kenya. The Government has embraced the use of ICT to offer efficient delivery of services to its customers. Internationally, some governments have fully transformed to E-Governments and this has led to tremendous benefits both to the citizens and the Governments. The benefits include efficient service delivery, cost savings and an overall improvement in transparency within the institutions. The Kenyan government is too moving towards realizing full service delivery through existing and emerging technologies. Inline with Vision 2030 where the country wants to transform to information based economy it is paramount that services are delivered right to the fingertips of the citizens. To achieve this, there is a need to exploit fully the existing technologies that support this goal. Nam Joon Park supports this argument for a framework that users can access and check their health status at anytime and anywhere using mobile devices. In his view such a framework allows for easier access to services as well as making it possible to incorporate to other systems. The access of information online has been available via websites which are currently optimized for the web users. There are however more citizens with access to mobile devices than there are to the personal computers. There is therefore a need to improve and increase the reach of these services to more citizens. Recent study by the media has shown that over sixty percent of Kenyans own or have access to mobile phones. This means that it would and is a good platform to leverage information access. In order to achieve this, a standard has to be set to allow fast and ease of access to these services by the varying requirements as determined by the mobile devices. Mobile web services will be utilized to bridge this gap. By using mobile web services, the citizens will have access to the information and resources on a real-time basis and throughout. The various access methods that the web services will interface to will give the citizen the choice of accessing using SMS, USSD, Mobile web or Java ME applications. The
open source software available has become more robust and secure and can be adopted to provide these services cost effectively. Some Governments across the globe e.g. Korea, United States, United Kingdom and Australia are among the many that have provided some Government services to up to 100% service levels. This has had huge benefits and impact on the Governments. According to Hyeon-Kon Kim, there have been more advantages towards contribution to broadening of policy objectives and building trust between government and citizens. He adds that there is more to be done in terms of issues such as offline and online integration, user trust in security and privacy. In conclusion there has been adoption of this framework in various fields such as healthcare, utility bills and even real-time news updates. I agree with the research already done in terms of the value that they add to the society in relation to information access. There is however a tendency by the researchers to discuss the framework in terms of areas where there is high penetration of personal computers. In Kenya in particular there are more mobile users than are Pc users. There is therefore a need to identify the validity of this hypothesis that building a mobile web service framework e- government would greatly improve service delivery.