Rapid Development of Electronic Public Services – A Case Study in Electronic Licensing Service Tomasz Janowski, Adegboyega Ojo, Elsa Estevez United Nations University, International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST) P.O. Box 3058, Macau +853 5040443 {tj, ao, elsa}@iist.unu.edu ABSTRACT The availability of Electronic Public Services (EPS) is essential for achieving meaningful e-Government. As governments deliver many services to citizens, businesses and other customers, making all these services available online requires a systematic and rigorous approach. A crucial element in this approach is the availability of an Infrastructure to enable rapid EPS development. This demo presents an Electronic Licensing (e-Licensing) Service developed upon a prototype Software Infrastructure for EPS. The Infrastructure comprises: (1) frameworks for design of Front- Office and Back-Office applications, (2) services for workflow management and cross-agency messaging, and (3) an Infrastructure Management Service. The demo shows the process of developing an EPS upon the EPS Infrastructure and demonstrates the various use cases of the e-Licensing application rapidly developed upon the Infrastructure. This work was done in the context of the e-Macao Project, funded by the Government of Macao SAR to build a foundation for e-Government in Macao. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.4 [Information Systems Application]: Software Infrastructure General Terms Design, Standardization, Measurement, Reliability Keywords Electronic Licensing Services, Electronic Public Service, Software Infrastructure, Rapid Application Development 1. INTRODUCTION Licensing services entail granting various kinds of government permissions to citizens, businesses, visitors, associations, etc. We can identify at least three types of permissions: (1) Licensure – right to practice, (2) Certification – right to title, and (3) Permit - right to perform a regulated task. Licensing services constitute a major category of authorization services [1] offered by governments. Examples include: construction license, import and export license, trademark registration and driving license. An Electronic Licensing Service (e-Licensing) is expected to support the application, processing and issuance phases of licensing services by providing electronic channels for actors - applicants, agency staff and third-parties - to interact with one another. The primary channel for the applicant is the Internet, agency staff would typically interact through agency Intranets, while the interactions between agencies and third-party organizations are facilitated by specialized and secure messaging applications available within internal networks of all parties concerned. It is also possible for applicants to use mobile devices to interact with the licensing agency, for instance to request for the status of an application. In this paper we demonstrate the process of rapidly developing an e-Licensing application based on a software infrastructure for EPS (developed by the authors and other collaborators) and step through the major components of the e-Licensing System through a series of use cases. Through these use cases, we reveal the features of the five major aspects of the e-Licensing System and indirectly the operations of the underlying software infrastructure. 2. REQUIREMENTS In addition to typical non-functional requirements like reliability, availability, extensibility, maintainability and user-friendliness, a typical e-Licensing system is expected to support a number of core functional requirements. We can identify three categories of such requirements to support: (1) the applicant in submitting its application and subsequently tracking the status of the application; (2) the Front-Office staff in establishing correctness and completeness of the submitted applications and assessing eligibility of the applicant; (3) the Back-Office staff in certifying submitted information, processing the license application, seeking information and opinions on the application from other agencies, and communicating the outcome to the applicant. The use cases in Figure 1 cover all three categories of requirements. These use cases will drive the demonstration session later. Figure 1. e-Licensing Service – Use Cases