Next Generation Government Service Bus - The Blockchain Landscape

Abstract

Administrative decentralization, accordingly to the World Bank, “seeks to redistribute authority, responsibility and financial resources for providing public services among different levels of government. It is the transfer of responsibility for the planning, financing and management of certain public functions from the central government and its agencies to field units of government agencies, subordinate units or levels of government, semi-autonomous public authorities or corporations, or area-wide, regional or functional authorities”. Similarly, it defines political decentralization as: “political decentralization aims to give citizens or their elected representatives more power in public decision-making. It is often associated with pluralistic politics and representative government, but it can also support democratization by giving citizens, or their representatives, more influence in the formulation and implementation of policies”. Clearly, independently from the form of governance, being it centralized or federated, or more simply from where institutions that constitute the government are located, every government is inherently decentralized or better “distributed”. Starting from this concept we have that consequently every government has a set of services that are provided to its citizens and businesses from several (sometimes) interconnected entities, the same that concur to the governance of the process or control it. These services are today provided from these entities independently from the others, with a clear complex structure that is even more complex when a service is provided across multiple entities. While today we tend to implement IT systems providing services to citizens through a service bus model, it is clear that this approach tries to model a distributed/decentralized model with a centralized/linear tool. The idea behind this paper is that with a decentralized IT solution as Blockchain/DLT we would be more effective in representing and therefore implementing government services as the two share the same base conceptual model. With the advent of the Blockchain/DLT paradigm we have a clear match between an IT architecture/ecosystem and the interconnected structure of government services. This paper explains and positions architectural approaches to implement such service integration through blockchain/DL technologies in order to greatly simplify the provisioning of such services between entities. The driving concept of this paper is to surface how governments can enhance efficiency, security, transparency and engagement, while allowing each of their entities to run their own processes with their own technology stacks, regardless of the processes and technologies of any other entity A wide introduction and use of Blockchain/DLT in the public services has the potential to transform the public sector and produce benefits for public organizations, users and citizens. Transparency, speed, shared & controlled consensus, can affect the relationship and trust between public administration and citizens/corporations and potentially reshape interactions in the society. Such technologies are able to change the way relations are managed among several actors, including firms, and produce large savings and increase accountability.