Sustainable Public Financial Management

Looking back 5 years, looking ahead 5 Years

Doug Hadden, VP Products

While getting ready for my presentation next Monday at the International Consortium on Governmental Financial Management (ICGFM) conference in Miami, I had time to reflect on my predictions for 2007. The presentation Monday is on the Social Future of Public Financial Management. 5 Years ago, it was “New Technologies for Public Financial Management.”

By James Elrick

Good news. FreeBalance President & CEO Manuel Pietra is an awards finalist for the OCRI Next Generation Executive Award. OCRI is Ottawa’s economic development agency. It is the rallying point to bring business, education, research and talent together to create the winning economic conditions that allow Ottawa’s knowledge-based companies to thrive locally and compete globally. OCRI promotes sustainable economic development to maintain Ottawa’s high quality of life.

This award recognizes an individual who has had a significant impact on the success and/or transformation of their organization as a direct result of their leadership. The winner will be announced at the OCRI Awards on April 7, 2011 at the Hilton Lac Leamy. Here are reasons why Manuel is an awards finalist:

Unique Approach
In 2006, Pietra brought international experience to FreeBalance and introduced a new management team. FreeBalance was restructured into a global customer-centric company with a focus on government financial sustainability. The company added new customers in Canada, Pakistan, Panama, Palestine, Uganda, Kyrgyzstan, Namibia, and Liberia.

Pietra developed a unique approach to involve customers in the product development process, including the FreeBalance International Steering Committee (FISC). The steering committee is all about the government customers. FISC is an opportunity for public financial managers to share lessons learned. To discuss emerging trends. And, to set company direction. This is necessary for a customer-centric approach.

With the introduction of a new business strategy and customer-centric approach, FreeBalance is growing at a rate of 18-20% per year. And, the third quarter in 2010 has been the best in the company history. Global employee growth has kept pace as FreeBalance has been actively hiring to support the growing customer base.

FreeBalance customers span the globe and the user community includes public financial management (PFM) professionals in 18 countries, including Afghanistan, Canada, Iraq, Kosovo, Mongolia, Pakistan, Panama, Sierra Leone, Southern Sudan, and Timor-Leste among others. FreeBalance has more than 60,000 users around the world. FreeBalance software manages a global civil service workforce of 1.5 million and also manages a quarter trillion ($US) annual budgets worldwide.

Organizational Results
Pietra realized that values were important to sustain long-term corporate success. Effective PFM transforms countries. He implemented the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) philosophy at the core to the company mission. Global citizenship commits FreeBalance to international country development, knowledge sharing and service improvement.

Technology Results
Since 2006, Pietra has ensured that FreeBalance offers leading-edge technology that uses sustainable and proven open-source middleware and modern component-level Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Unlike competitors, FreeBalance does not hide old technology with a web “wrapper”. The FreeBalance Accountability Suite is pure web. FreeBalance technology is optimized for government needs for scalability, usability and maintainability. FreeBalance software is built with reusable PFM components. This lowers total cost of ownership (TCO) for government customers and makes the technology more extensible. FreeBalance leverages technology best practices to achieve technology leapfrog over our competitors. FreeBalance offers full support for any commercial technology stack, so FreeBalance can support customer requirements with both open source and commercial technology.  

Doug Hadden, VP Products

There was an interesting tweet moment at the FreeBalance International Steering Committee meeting last week requesting a transcipt of some comments about open systems made by our President and CEO Manuel Pietra.  Manuel’s viewpoint was that developing software using open systems enables FreeBalance (and others) to more easily extend applications. That’s because the nature of software development has changed over the years from very explicit “use cases.” Software was developed with an end in mind. Workflow, rules and reports were developed to meet the articulated need. This methodology is changing to where software components could be reused for purposes beyond the imagination of the software developer. Open systems will become the norm because of this efficiency provided. It breaks the economy of scale advantage that large companies hold in the software industry.

Technology Transition to Open Systems

We are in a transition period from closed to open systems in the software industry. In the closed system era, integration within the product suite was considered paramount. Enterprise software companies competed on the basis of horizontal and vertical functionality.  Economies of scale meant that the largest vendors provided the best extensibility. Proprietary middleware was used to lock customers into the entire “stack”. Open systems were presented as risky because proprietary standards tended to be faster.

The software industry is in a transition period where proprietary systems are opening up. This is often seen as a way to extend proprietary systems by the larger vendors. There is a concerted effort to build out an eco-system of partners who add value to proprietary systems. We believe that this will transition to fully open systems. Software companies will compete on openness and customer processes rather than lock-in.

Transparency Transition to Open Systems

We also appear to be in a transition period in government transparency. Governments have begun to publish information in document or machine readable format rather than relying on access to information requests as the primary method of transparency. The press is becoming “disintermediated” thanks to transparency portals. And, more governments are realizing that publication of government data can act as an economic engine, or, as Tim O’Reilly calls it, “government as platform.”These two trends in open systems an open government are more than coincidental. It is difficult and expensive to create open data from closed systems. That’s why many open government projects run into problems.

Historical Perspective

Software systems have become more open over time. Early computing did not have the luxury of processing and memory that we have today. The environment was closed and applications were closed systems.  Applications were focused on high value elements of business processes. Software has become more open as the software footprint has grown.

1990s to early 2000s saw the rise of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software replacing  previous business systems. These applications covered multiple horizontal and vertical markets (as defined as ERP II by Gartner Group). Instrasuite integration became a competitive differentiator. The “dot com” era saw a boom and bust of e-commerce applications. The key problem in for dot com providers was the need to create the entire transaction infrastructure. This left some winners like eBay and Amazon who were able to achieve the economies of scale.

We are currently in the early days of “cloud computing” and “Web 2.0″ eras. Although there remains some closed systems, the software market is moving rapidly to open systems. This includes the use of open source middleware like MySQL, Linux, Hibernate that enables organizations to develop extensible and robust transaction systems. Middleware has become commoditized.

The Future of Open Systems

Government Resource Planning (GRP), transparency portals and enterprise software are transitioning to open systems. The next era will be characterized by:

• Component-based Service-Oriented Architectures where applications can be assembled from Object Oriented components from different manufacturers.
• Machine readable systems where applications will support domain industry standards, XML/Web services as a matter of course rather than explicit interfaces on monolithic architecture (what we call Monolithic Integration Architecture).
• Deployment options for centralized, de-centralized, shared services, and hosted without compromising functional completeness or system flexibility.

José  Saldanha, FreeBalance Vice President of Research and Development, described and demonstrated new technology at the FreeBalance International Steering Committee (FISC) conference in Madeira Portugal. He described how FreeBalance uses open source middleware. Mr. Saldanha pointed out that the FreeBalance software is not open source.

Open Source

Vendors who sell a proprietary stack often means that the vendor has control over customers, according to Mr. Saldanha. The open FreeBalance system gives customers a wide choice in middleware and flexibility to change out components in the past. He described the differences in costs between open and closed source.  Mr. Saldanha described how open source middleware reduces the problem of “bloatware”.

Mr. Saldanha describing advantages of component Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Servlet vs. Enterprise Java Beans to achieve a smaller technical footprint and better performance. He described how enterprise software is often tested in the “swimming pool” but open source tested in the “ocean”. He described the advantages of using the latest technology for security and quality.

Updated User Interface

José  Saldanha demonstrated the new user-interface functional design. This includes ability for users to develop custom menus.  Users can search for menu items by typing items. Breadcrumbs take the user to where users located.  This upgrade of usability also improved performance significantly with rapid page rendering.

Layered Design

Mr. Saldanha described the layered structure in the FreeBalance Accountability Suite and FreeBalance Accountability Platform.  He pointed out that this approach provides good reusability and extensibility. This also improves maintenance.  The layered technical design makes for ease of deployment and improves scalability. He described the de-coupling points in the software.

FreeBalance Accountability Platform

Mr. Saldanha described the differences in using the FreeBalance Accountability Platform to design government applications versus using traditional technical platforms. The FreeBalance IDE provides:

• Parameterization
• Form templates
• Report templates
• Internal messages
• Base government entities
• Security model
• Integration with FreeBalance Software
• Integrated Development Environment
• Technical Platform

The benefits of this approach include the ease of developing, integrating and maintaining software. This reduces costs.

Deployment and Scaling

Mr. Saldanha described horizontal and vertical scaling. He described the advantages of the new licensing functionality that support concurrent, named and enterprise users. The software can be licensed at very small components.  He described the license key to add users and modules.

FreeBalance Releases

FreeBalance will deliver one minor or major version of the software every year. Functional updates are released every year. Technical revisions are available on-demand. Version 7 supports upgrades from any version to any other version with no intermediate stages. FreeBalance produces four revisions of the software every day for continuous testing.

About FISC

The annual FreeBalance International Steering Committee (FISC) conference runs from January 16 – 19, 2011 in Madeira, Portugal. FISC provides an interactive forum to exchange Public Financial Management (PFM) good practices among international customers and PFM thought leaders. FISC drives the FreeBalance Accountability Suite product vision to direct FreeBalance GRP solutions. Previous FISC events were held in Mt. Tremblant, Canada (2010); Prague, Czech Republic (2009); Cascais, Portugal (2008); and London, United Kingdom (2007).

Doug Hadden, VP Products

Executive meetings with customers is a cornerstone of our customer-centric approach to Government customers. After all, why should salespeople have all the fun? More importantly, executives in companies need to have direct unfiltered feedback from customers. It provides the context for decision-making. And, it is particularly important in our case because we focus exclusively on a single market – government. Hence, a deep understanding of the customer context is critical to our continued growth and success. We’re in the midst of engaging our Government of Canada customers. We’ve also met with policy stakeholders and customers from other vendors, particularly at conferences.

There are some interesting trends in Public Financial Management (PFM)  in the Government of Canada.

Transparency and Government 2.0

FreeBalance Government of Canada customers discussed openness and Web 2.0. There is a general trend about Government 2.0 adoption in the Government of Canada. Our discussions transcended the typical concerns over quality, privacy, security and risk of open data. Internal transparency among government organizations was an unexpected theme. Transparency in government tends to cover budget and financial disclosure, open procurement and civil service recruitment and spending. It is often assumed that the government acts as a single actor in these transparency categories. Yet, there is an overlap in policy and budget transparency between policy and executing agencies. This mirrors the need for policy and budget transparency with civil society and businesses.

Governments are under significant pressure to achieve better value for money: improve results with fewer resources and lower budgets.  In Canada, this has created a portfolio of policy analysis covering the entire spectrum of PFM. Communications between policy and executing organizations can be improved and harmonized through the use of new technologies, often called “Government 2.0.” There is a concern that traditional methods of policy information gathering and policy making may not have the desired result. Particularly when these policies are intended to cover emerging technology and new paradigms. There is a need for the type of continuous engagement on ideas and solutions enabled by blogs and wikis to achieve value for results. 

We also found that the transparency categories listed above does not address the holistic transparency footprint. For example, policies on budget transparency can affect civil service reporting. General policies to improve effectiveness have significant impacts on procurement and civil service processes and transparency. Government of Canada policy and political organizations are also struggling with notions of privilege and confidentiality in the development of policy.

Functional Gaps Remain

There is a major trend to process standardization within the Government of Canada. Standard processes and classifications provide for more effective decision-making at lower costs than unique processes and classifications. Yet, there are unique requirements in most government organizations. That’s why these organizations are separate. Virtually every Government of Canada organization has at least one unique requirement that impacts information systems. This complicates standardization of processes, systems or classifications. Integration with unique applications has become a key need for information systems within the Government of Canada.

Of course, we also see many functional gaps within Commercial-Off-the-Shelf (COTS) information systems designed for the private sector. Many of these systems have to be enhanced with software applications designed for government. In particular, there are gaps in generic budget awareness in financial and human resources systems.

Risk of Legacy Technology

Government of Canada organizations are struggling with modernizing the software portfolio. There is a range of legacy technology in use by the Government of Canada including custom-developed mainframe and client/server applications that were designed to address functional gaps. Sometimes the COTS private sector software alternatives were too expensive with unneeded feature sets. And, this older technology is often difficult and expensive to maintain. And, difficult to integrate. Yet, functionally critical.

Many Government of Canada organizations are leveraging the older generation of web-enabled software. This appears to be a risk.  There are many definitions of web enablement that has creating confusion. Many software vendors  position products as web-based when the user interface is presented in a browser and there are no plug-ins required to operate. However, many enterprise applications have client/server software at the core. This software operates through a translation layer that reduces performance and limits integration – particularly in the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment envisioned in Enterprise Architectures.

The use of Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) is growing dramatically in the private sector. Many incumbent enterprise software vendors not yet adapted to this market. For example, Salesforce.com provides configuration tools and integration points meet customer needs. The technology centrally hosts many customers with many configurations. Software designed for single on-premises deployment are difficult to adapt for the Cloud. And, for hosted shared services.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Sustainable PFM

The emphasis on value for money has enabled Government of Canada organizations to track the true cost of PFM software. Software, consulting, support and training services are often acquired seperately by Government of Canada organizations. The focus on TCO had identified the previously hidden costs for sustaining the PFM investment. Many Government of Canada organizations are discovering that some COTS and custom software requires significant on-going consulting fees. Training and certification requirements for some software applications have high recurrent annual costs.

Government of Canada organizations are discovering that cost saving associated with pooling resources are not significant. This seems to be dependent on the COTS solution selected. Despite savings through clustering departments, shared hosting, or centralizing data centres, there remains a high cost for Government of Canada organizations. It seems that economies of scale are hard to achieve when the software solution is not designed for this purpose. Of course, our position is that FreeBalance software has been designed for the government domain and new methods of deployment.

Customer Centric

I wroter earlier about improvements in FreeBalance customer support metrics. These metrics are outputs and may not be related to customer experience or expectation. And, improving processes to improve customer-centricity tends to have a delayed outcome as past problems are solved. Our Government of Canada customers told us that we have improved support. This was also confirmed in meetings that we have had with central authorities who also recognize how well we are supporting customers. Although, it should be noted that customer engagement is a journey and not a destination. We are always looking at ways to improve customer support and embedding customers into our software development processes.

International Success

Our Government of Canada customers are proud of the contribution they have made to FreeBalance GRP products. They know that the respected discipline in PFM in the Government of Canada is being used to improve governance in countries around the world. They are also benefiting from this market. The scalability and hosting requirements for international customers has been important in the technology design of Version 7 of the FreeBalance Accountability Suite. Functionality richness has also increased the product portfolio to meet more PFM needs in Canada.

by Doug Hadden, VP Products

The United States Financial Management Line of Business (FMLoB) moving to the “cloud”? Gartner Group concluding that “shared services” is on the descent to the trough of disillusionment? To say nothing of analysis like:

a disturbing feature of the current debate on shared services has been the absence of a well-articulated economic and political rationale for this form of service delivery, a lack of analysis of alternative models of shared service provision and a neglect of available empirical evidence.

Yet, there seems to be an overwhelming set of evidence that centrally hosting budget, financial, grant and human resource management has significant cost savings. In an era of “doing more with less”, why have shared services run into so many difficulties?

FreeBalance Point of View

Just to be clear – FreeBalance supports shared services. Our Government of Canada Cluster is a shared service. Canadian government organizations work together to reduce support costs, and set FreeBalance product direction. (Along with the FreeBalance International Steering Committee.) Most of our international customers operate on a government hosted centralized system or shared service.

Cost-Benefit of “One Size Fits All”

It’s  difficult to find anything but unbridled enthusiasm about shared services on the Internet. Of course, much of the content is fashioned by large vendors and consulting companies who benefit from shared services approaches. There are many compelling arguments that many processes in government organizations are identical or similar and should be standardized. Standardization simplifies support, enables personnel movement without re-training and facilitates product upgrades. It eliminates duplication. Gains economies of scale.

Yet, many government agencies have unique requirements. Some are legally mandated. There are often many systems in place to manage the entire budget cycle. Many governments find it difficult to support this legitimate variability in need. Many hosted shared services implementations host completely different instances of the same software. According to Jeff Steinhoff, formerly with the US Government and now with KPMG:

when people started going to huge ERP solutions, for which they were dumping hundreds of millions of dollars, in some cases in excess of $1 billion, they were over-engineered, not well designed, everybody invented their own wheel. There was just problem after problem.

That’s why most ERP vendors recommend that government shared services use “vanilla” implementations with zero code customization. Which is a bit of challenge. Especially using software designed for the private sector. Especially when there is constant reform and modernization in government. It’s not “one size fits all”, rather it is more a “lowest common denominator” for those government agencies with modest needs.

Shared Services Today: Square Pegs and Round Holes?

Maybe it’s time to consider that the problem isn’t the shared services round hole. Maybe the problem is the software square peg. That wasn’t designed to fit into the round hole. We need to round these square pegs to make shared services work.

Yes, the FreeBalance Accountability Suite Version 7 meets these needs. But, it’s not a big secret: it’s just software architecture best practices.

Governance: Tail wags dog?

Gartner Group has predicted:

By 2013, more than 60 per cent of existing IT shared services that do not revise their current governance model will not be able to achieve the benefits expected in the business case.

The software industry seems to work like this: vendors tell customers what they are going to get. Central shared services agencies decide how to overcome the software limitations. Departments and agency users are frustrated by software limitations. These users blame the central agency.

Most of the shared services governance literature describes how to manage decision-making within the government. The problem is that governments are not setting software product directions.

The big  dog needs to wag the tail.  Software companies must commit to meet government requirements. These companies should not be “hands-off” operating through consulting organizations. Software companies providing software for shared services – whose annual Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for large governments is in the hundreds of millions of dollars – must devote resources to meet government needs. There must be steering committees that obligate vendors to meet government goals.  That’s governance.

FreeBalance_Cluster

Our Financial Management Institute of Canada (FMI) Professional Development Week started early with presentations to the FreeBalance Government of Canada Cluster and to our Performance Budgeting for Human Capital (PBHC) customers in Ottawa. FreeBalance has the largest cluster in the Government of Canada – 28 departments, agencies and commissions. And, PBHC has become the gold standard for civil service planning and salary planning. We’re participating in FMI as a sponsor. We’ll be talking about new product releases and describing how government performance management needs Government 2.0 in order to succeed.

The Cluster presentation was a deep dive into the technology of the FreeBalance Accountability Suite. Both presentations ended with invitations to join the on-line FreeBalance Customer Exchange. We started both presentations with a quick business update including mentioning the Uganda Civil Service Management implementation and the reduction of open support cases by 64% over the past 18 months.

This wasn’t your typical roadmap presentation: “this is what you’re going to get, this is when you’re going to get it, this is when you’re going to have to upgrade, if you don’t like it, it’s too bad.” After all, the FreeBalance roadmap is owned by customers. Our goal is to align our roadmap: government customers tell us what we are going to deliver and when we are going to deliver it.

 We described the FreeBalance Accountability Suite original design criteria. We believe that many problems experienced in the implementation of Government Resource Planning (GRP) systems originate with the design. We’ve written and presented our lesson-learned: the typical methods used by software vendors to design, develop and implement software needs to be adjusted to support Public Financial Management (PFM) needs.

Social networking capabilities, often called Government 2.0,  are required for the current generation of pure-web GRP. We showed part of our original vision case from 2005. This original vision included the fundamental integration of transactions, content and collaboration within a single system architecture.

We described:

• Use of software architecture best practices
• Component-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Open system and open source support
• Ability to choose open source or commercial middleware
• Support for government-specific requirements
• Configuration and progressive activation approach
• The product commitments and roadmap for the next 18 months
• Support for shared services and cloud computing
• How the FreeBalance Accountability Platform can help develop custom applications

There were many questions that we were able to clarify:

• Version 7 of the FreeBalance Accountability Suite provides comprehensive human resources and payroll functionality – full civil service management
• FreeBalance is testing  software using VMWare
• The technical infrastructure is open – we are prepared to support other operating system environments other than Linux and Windows
• How “custom domains” differs from the typical “additional fields” approach
• How the technology is scalable and the scale of recent implementations
• Exact method for multiple year chart of accounts
• How customers can customize help, documentation and e-learning
• Software deployment

We look forward to more dialog with our Government of Canada customers. We described how customers can participate to help design, adapt and test. Web 2.0 tools provide companies with the ability to support customer disruptive  innovation, as described by Clayton Christensen.  It’s a far cry from the days of “Mad Men” – creating demand when there isn’t any. The management of the Cluster has been enabling more interaction among customers and with FreeBalance. We are working together to leverage tools to enable more peer communications.

This is section 5.4.2 of a series of blog entries creating a Government IFMIS Technology Evaluation Guide. This includes information to assist in evaluating IFMIS options and the technology requirements for FreeBalance IFMIS implementations. These series will be combined with feedback to produce a comprehensive Technology Evaluation Guide to be published on our web site.

Software engineering practices advance as technology modernizes. Many commercial software applications in use today were engineered based on obsolete practices. A fundamental requirement for the FreeBalance Accountability Platform was to support the most modern best practices in software architecture including: 

1. Service-Oriented Architectures
2. N-Tier Design
3. Pure Web
4. Cloud Computing support
5. Flexible deployment
6. Web 2.0
7. Open Systems

Development using a Service Oriented Architecture

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an established best practice in the development of new software. The techniques used to elaborate these components are based on a proven SOA architecture modeling tool. This maximizes the useful life of the software. Most commercial applications that support integration standards do not follow the best practice of component-based SOA where functionality is provided in small components. The component approach enables assembly, replacement and integration of components to form a complete application set. This differs from the approach of connectors on a monolithic application.

FreeBalance determined the high-level business components needed for an Integrated Financial Management Information System for national and sub-national governments in developing and developed nations. The results have enabled FreeBalance to:

1. Architect a ‘service-oriented architecture’ through service identification and definition into ‘business components’.
2. Determine the entire scope of the current and future FreeBalance product portfolio based on domain requirements.
3. Identify the relative value of any component through the use of a ‘component business map’, ‘business competencies’ and ‘heat map’. This allows FreeBalance to exceed typical COTS capabilities for components that are important for governments.
4. Identify reusable components and support extensibility to enable FreeBalance to support emerging government needs faster.
5.  Provide a technical approach that meets the high technical standards of the Governments of Canada the United States and many other countries that require a robust SOA approach.

N-Tier Design

Most government IT departments want software with 3-tier or n-tier architectures, which allows these applications to be scaled easier. Functionality can be extended to different devices. The FreeBalance Accountability Platform utilizes an n-tier architecture that includes the following:

• Separation of presentation, business logic and data layers. These three layers support extensibility including migrating to different display devices. It assists in identifying software problems and upgrading to new technology.
• Multiple business logic layers. The business logic layers of “entities”, “functions” and “applications” in the FreeBalance Accountability Platform can be viewed as multiple tiers.
• Scalability. Each tier can be scaled separately enabling governments to add equipment to meet added capacity. Vertical and horizontal scaling is supported.

Pure Web

Web-based systems provide many organizational benefits including simplicity and reducing administration costs. Most business software available today for financial management is not purely web-based. These software applications often have client/server functionality at its core. The functionality is presented on the web via a browser and appears to be fully web-based, but is not. A significant portion of the “business layer” is in client/server. Many aspects of the ‘business layer” are often expressed in the “data layer” with proprietary database calls or stored procedures. These characteristics reduce the each of use and administrative costs. The FreeBalance Accountability Platform is “pure web” technology supporting:

• Web Browsers. Displays information to users in web browsers using industry standards including HTML, W3C and CSS. Ease of use supported through Java Server Faces. Does not require special plug-ins to operate.
• Web Server. Data sent from servers in standard web format using web servers.
• Application Server. Java-based application server follows industry standards and contains business logic.
• Databases. Supports different relational databases. Does not generate proprietary database instructions or use stored procedures.

Cloud Computing

Many organizations are acquiring software on-line without using their data centers. This is often called Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), on-demand, or cloud computing. Some governments are prepared to have financial applications hosted by third parties. Many governments wish to consolidate data centres by providing shared services. Shared services enable a government entity to provide software on demand to many government organizations. The FreeBalance Accountability Platform supports cloud computing deployment by supporting multiple instances to run different configurations on the same server or group of servers.

Flexible Government Deployment

Many governments implement financial software across all government tiers. The national political structure of countries ranges from highly centralized unitary governments to highly decentralized federal governments. Many countries are decentralized where government entities require some degree of financial autonomy. Some government organizations operate in areas without reliable access to computer networks. The integration of government functions among tiers of governments differs in scope. Most commercial financial software designed for the private sector assumes always-on and highly reliable computer networks. These systems also assume tight hierarchical control from the head office that may not apply in government.

The FreeBalance Accountability Platform has been designed for deployment options encountered in multi-tiered governments. It has also been designed to enable centralized and decentralized deployments and synchronization. The FreeBalance Accountability Platform supports the following deployment options:

• Centralized Web-Based Deployment. Support the traditional method for the deployment of pure web-based solutions is through a centralized structure.
• Decentralized and Developed Deployment. Support decentralized deployment of PFM functionality and multi-tiered synchronization for federal political systems or in situations where there is insufficient or non-existent network connectivity. This approach deploys simple government financial management functionality to sub-national governments with data synchronization (budget allocations from the central government and outturns from the sub-national government) when bandwidth is available or through the physical transfer of data.
• Hybrid Centralized and Decentralized. Support a combined approach that can include regional centres.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 technology provides rich user interfaces to the web. These interfaces can be as functional and rich as traditional client/server. The FreeBalance Accountability Platform supports rich Web 2.0 interfaces to improve usability through:

• Rich User Interfaces. Support of Java Server Faces (JSF) and Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX).
• Content Management Integration. Support of web content and document management including rich text editors and adaptable help.
• Notation. Support of notation, narrative and threads to enhance collaboration.

Open Systems

Governments want technology choices. Some large software companies attempt to lock customers into proprietary technology. This enables software companies to charge more for support and additional software. The FreeBalance Accountability Platform is a standards-based open system providing choice to government through:

• Java Enterprise Edition. Support the broadest range of open source and commercial operating systems. Java software operates on all major computer brands.
• Web Services Support: Support standards to enable more effective integration among government systems.
• Open Source Support: Support open source and commercial database management, application and web server technologies to give governments the broadest choices.

This is section 5.5 of a series of blog entries creating a Government IFMIS Technology Evaluation Guide. This includes information to assist in evaluating IFMIS options and the technology requirements for FreeBalance IFMIS implementations. These series will be combined with feedback to produce a comprehensive Technology Evaluation Guide to be published on our web site.

The FreeBalance Accountability Platform is a pure web-based designed. Unlike ERP software that wraps client/server functionality to support the web, the FreeBalance Accountability Platform is web-native, using only web technology rendered via an application server.

This approach consists of using object-oriented design and development in a layered manner, and follows established best practices for software development. The FreeBalance Accountability Platform has been designed as a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

SOAs are designed to enable more effective software integration, regardless of which software infrastructure is used. The SOA goal is to enable organizations to assemble and re-assemble applications using components from multiple sources.

The legacy ERP value proposition is predicated on the notion that integrated systems are more cost-effective to maintain than multiple best-of-breed applications. Government IT departments are beginning to realize that the new era of SOA enables integrating these best-of-breed applications.

Java Enterprise Edition Infrastructure

FreeBalance supports open systems and open standards to provide the most flexible and cost-effective options for governments. The benefits of Java EE infrastructure include:

• Proven enterprise open source components.
• Financial sustainability through low cost components.
• Small technical footprint – designed to reduce the technical infrastructure to support software
• Ease of deployment, license management, integration, and workflow.
• Integrated national and local government deployment.
• Scalability from small governments to large governments.
• Multi-language support.

The specific technical components in use for the FreeBalance Accountability Platform are:

• User Interface: Apache MyFaces Trinidad.
• Object Management and Orchestration: Spring Framework.
• Data Persistence and Modeling: Hibernate and JPA.
• Open Database support.

User Interface

Trinidad is a Java Server Faces component and part of the Apache MyFaces project.  The JSF framework includes a large, enterprise quality component library, and supports critical features such as accessibility and right-to-left languages. This open source project was donated to the Apache foundation by Oracle Corporation. It also includes a set of framework features such as:

• Partial-page rendering support for the entire component set for fast response.
• Integrated client-side validation to reduce errors.
• PageFlowScope for communicating between pages to accelerate page to page times.
• Obfuscation of client-side scripting to prevent users from determining program logic and prevents hacking.
• Stripping of comments and whitespace within data sent to user interface to reduces the size of data exchange between client and web server, resulting in decreased bandwidth needs.
• Strong access control to improve security.
• Proven support in secure environments such as the Federation of Austrian social security institutions and the standard framework for Oracle Fusion applications.
• Industry standard Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption supports the industry best practices in security.

Object Management and Orchestration

The Spring Framework is an open source development framework for the Java platform. The benefits of the Spring Framework include:

• Comprehensiveness and modularity.
• Providing a framework for integration.
• Enabling management of components across architectural tiers.
• Facilitating good coding practices.
• Ease of testing.
• Consistent programming model to support Java standards such as JDBC, JMS, and JNDI.
• Proven performance in enterprise applications and supported by companies like IBM.
• A powerful MVC (Model-View-Controller) infrastructure that is considered a best practice.

Data Persistence and Modeling

Hibernate is a high performance object/relational persistence and query service that enables the creation of object-oriented applications. Hibernate enables applications to be database neutral while taking advantage of SQL functions. Applications can be written based on business objects that map seamlessly to database physical objects.

The benefits of Hibernate include:

• Increased productivity to meet changing governmentsby enabling developers to concentrate on business logic and by minimizing code. Pooling, caching and transaction management is also handled by Hibernate.
• Greater maintainabilityby automated object/relational persistence.
• Higher performancethrough optimized throughput management
• Vendorindependence, enabling governments to select application servers and databases from commercial and open source vendors.

JPA is the Java Persistence API that provides additional persistence capabilities.

Open Database support.

Commercial and open source databases are supported. Applications are currently developed using Oracle, Microsoft and MySQL databases, but other databases could be easily supported.

Servlet-based Java Enterprise Edition

The use of Servlets enables smaller footprint applications compared to Enterprise Java Beans that was typically used in the previous generation of enterprise applications. These Servlet based applications are easier to deploy and require less computing resources.

FreeBalance Government Framework (FW)

The Government Framework leverages Java Enterprise Edition with a set of software architectural components designed to enable public financial management. The characteristics of the FW include:

• Integration of transactions with content and collaboration.
• A single integrated portal for financial and records management.
• Ease of use for civil servants, even with lower capacity.
• Centralized ‘audit’ capabilities.
• The use of proven software for collaboration.

FreeBalance Government Entities (GE)

Government Entities are a series of standard base components that are reused for government functions and applications. These entities are inherited, configured and adapted to support system extensibility. The characteristics of the GEs include:

• Government-specific functions such as built-in flexible budgetary controls.
• Enabling of rapid implementation, configuration and change.
• An extensible base for new applications to extend customer investment.

FreeBalance Government Functions (GF)

Government Functions are a series of functional components that leverage Government Entities that have been adapted and packaged for application usage. This creates standard functions that are leveraged to support more applications and features.

FreeBalance Government Applications (GA)

Government Applications are built on Government Functions. Applications share common functions and are packaged from the Government Functions.

This is section 3.1.1 of a series of blog entries creating a Government IFMIS Technology Evaluation Guide. This includes information to assist in evaluating IFMIS options and the technology requirements for FreeBalance IFMIS implementations. These series will be combined with feedback to produce a comprehensive Technology Evaluation Guide to be published on our web site.

It is easy to be lost in buzzwords: Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), Web Services, Composite Applications…

Software vendors are quick to claim compliance with these standards. White papers are written full of diagrams. Experts warn about security. Before you know it, there is an industry trying to govern the implementation of the standard. Experts argue about who has implemented the standard best.

It becomes difficult to understand the benefits of SOA to a government. Technical nuances do not appear to be relevant. All vendors seem to claim compliance with SOA or the intent of SOA.

History of SOA

Perspective is needed. Traditionally, software was designed for a purpose in mind and developed on a technology platform such as Java, .Net or a 4^th Generation Language. These applications were designed to be self-contained , with some ability to integrate with other applications. This integration was often limited to applications using the same technology platform. Technology limited government modernization.

Large technology vendors were able to provide a portfolio of software products that provided intra-suite integration. Governments were faced, with the option of using best-of-breed applications with limited integration or a portfolio of tightly integrated applications from a single vendor that did not meet all needs.Governments could not achieve objectives with the technology choices.

There were two major initiatives in the late 1990’s that were designed to support better integration among applications. There were temporary solutions like RPC, RMI and CORBA. The development of Java enabled the “write once, run anywhere” approach. The creation of Web Services (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI) and specific XML-based industry standards enabled better integration among applications. Government found that integrating processes meant acquiring a portfolio of expensive applications, often called “monolithic” applications. Governments could not afford needed technology.

Web Services enables applications to integrate regardless of technology platform.

Service-Oriented Architecture promises the ability to assemble needed requirements from software components. These are known as composite applications. Composite applications will enable governments to combine Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) and custom applications together. Governments will be able to purchase needed components from many vendors and get competitive prices. SOA provides choice and helps governments meet unique requirements better. SOA protects the government technology investment.

Service-Oriented Architecture using a component model enables the integration of small components from many sources to assemble an application.

A true Service Oriented Architecture should enable integration at many levels or layers of components and applications.

MIA or SOA?

Many software vendors provide monolithic applications. These applications are characterized by a large technology footprint. These applications often require purchasing underlying technology or “middleware”. The minimum size of an application component is large. The applications often support integration using Web Services and industry standards. But, these applications are not composite applications. Functionality from these applications cannot be purchased as an individual component for reuse by a government.

One of the main motivations for supporting industry standard integration for some software vendors is to enable interfacing applications from acquired companies. In the age of software consolidation, vendors need to interface applications together. The complexity of these interfaces are often hidden through a user interface layer.

These large applications with integration characteristics do not follow the intention of Service-Oriented Architecture. We term this: Monolithic Integration Architecture (MIA). The MIA vendors have a business model to “own the customer” by provided as much of the software footprint as possible: all business, content and reporting applications, application serving, databases, development tools, business process and business rules.

In Monolithic Integration Architecture, applications from different sources are internally integrated. The entire monolithic application provides interfaces.

Government organization looking at technology options can determine whether options are SOA or MIA by determining whether:

• Applications require the acquisition of a set of middleware components.
• Individual components can be acquired rather than a complete application.
• Open source infrastructure software can be used.
• Integration with current government software can be enabled.
• Applications were designed as components in the first place.
• Applications are a series of applications acquired by purchasing companies.