oracle social welfare and the cloud - wernbergtougaard

An Oracle White Paper

October 2014

Social Services and “the Cloud”

Cloud-enabling Social Welfare and Human Services –

Impact and considerations.


Disclaimer

The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information

purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any

material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The

development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains

at the sole discretion of Oracle.

Executive Overview

The purpose of this white paper is to outline the options as well as the challenges that many

Governments and local authorities are facing with using Cloud technologies in providing services for

citizens and companies in the Social Welfare and Human Services area. Furthermore this white paper

provides insight on the industry solution that Oracle pursues in the area globally. The paper is part of the

proceedings of the ISSA e-Services seminar held in Baku, October 22-23rd 2014..


Introduction ....................................................................................... 2

Oracle’ strategy for Cloud in Social Welfare & Human Services. ....... 4

5 Myths with respect to Public Sector use of Cloud. .......................... 6

Myth #1: Everything Will Go to the Public Cloud ............................ 6

Myth #2: You’re Either Cloud or You’re Not. .................................. 7

Myth #3: Clouds Are One Size Fits All ........................................... 8

Myth #4: Cloud Will Lock You In .................................................... 9

Myth #5: Reducing Cost Is the Biggest Benefit of Cloud .............. 10

Cloud and Privacy Protection ...................................................... 11

Cloud Recommendations for Public Sector .................................. 12

Oracle’ Strategy for Social Welfare and Human Services. ............... 14

Service-Oriented Architecture for Social Services. ....................... 16

The Componentized Enterprise Functional Architecture (CEFA) . 18

Separating policies from processes ............................................. 19

Commercial of the Shelf (COTS) ................................................. 21

Open Standards .......................................................................... 22

Learn from others – use good practices ....................................... 22

Ecosystem for Influencers. .......................................................... 22

Conclusion ...................................................................................... 24

Oracle and Public Sector ................................................................. 25


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Introduction

Social Security Agencies, Pension Administration Agencies and Public Employment Services

all over the world have faced great challenges during the financial crisis – budgets have been

cut, funds and portfolio’s have been diminishing and more and more citizens have required

support. But with great crises comes great opportunities. Many Governments have initiated

programs to prepare the “Social Welfare System”1 for the future – and a key consideration is

how to utilize ICT to maximize the efficiency of Public Administration, while ensure the optimal

service and “rule of law” for the Citizens.

The current decade will be influenced by a number of key technologies and approaches that

we redefine who Public Sector Organizations collaborate with their constituents. One can

certainly challenge if the “hype” around technology changes and innovations fundamentally will

change the mindsets or paradigms of Bismarck and Beveridge, but nonetheless there are

fundamental changes that will impact the way Public Sector agencies dealing with Social

Welfare and Human Services are organized, how they provide services to citizens and

companies and how quality of services are measured and ultimately valued.

There are 4 fundamental key paradigm shifts happening these years as illustrated below:

1 The term “Welfare” is used in the European style, meaning Government assisted systems to help those in need by provide a safety net along the guidelines from ILO on the Social Protection Floor.


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Mobility – as described in an earlier ISSA White Paper2 the society is rapidly changing with

respect to where, how, who, when we can access information. With the aspect of mobility we

suddenly have an opportunity to work at the citizens own premise rather than to require them

to come to us.

Social – the age of “Social Network” is now. As citizens we post information and have dialogs

with peers utilizing Social Networks - and increasingly we expect that Public Sector engage

and interact with us using Social Networks. Furthermore the Public Sector has a responsibility

for monitoring social dialogs as these can serve of early warnings of issues – could be with

fraud on Social Security or sub-standard quality of Social Care – that the citizens exchange

views around.

Big Data – information is power, especially if it is turned into knowledge and actions. A major

issue among most Social Security agencies around the world is, that it is very difficult to trace

the impact of fund allocation to Social Benefits and the policies that they are based upon. Big

Data provides the technologies and tools for collecting, measure and visualize complex time

series patterns in Social Benefit administration as well as a number of other areas.

Cloud – is the modern world the way of reverting to past times sharing of infrastructure. In the

early days of modern computing, centralized mainframes were the only way for Governments

to collect, store and analyze information to and from the citizens. That infrastructure was a

shared infrastructure, almost always running in a centralized Government owned facility.

The cloud establish a global, shared, not Government owned environment – thus driving costs

down, as investments, maintenance and operation is per seat. The cloud reality of today is that

solutions that have been developed for cloud can be accessed from anywhere and by anyone

(who have the right access credentials).

This paper will discuss how the cloud strategy of Oracle can help Social Welfare and Human

Services organizations and will also discuss some of the unique challenges that Governments

have and how to overcome these.

2 ISSA 13th ICT Conference, Brasilia, 2012 Proceedings


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Oracle’ strategy for Cloud in Social Welfare & Human Services.

At Oracle we have always been among the front runners of technology – we believe that new

innovations and new abilities are constantly needed to make more value for those we help –

whether the customer is Governments or the customers customers (the citizens) it is all about

enabling value creation – through efficiency, transformation of data into knowledge or simply

making life easier. And the same goes for Cloud. And for Social Service digitalization.

As cloud is developing there is a lot of terminology, but also innovations, that has to take place

in order to realize the potential in cloud. There is also many myths – especially on why

Governments cannot use cloud. One purpose of this white paper is to exemplify how Social

Welfare and Human Services agencies can get started with using cloud services and how the

future could look like.

But let us just dwell at the past – because the fundamental idea behind Cloud is not new.

When the first massive Public Sector ICT implementations took place in the 1960’ and 1970’

they used centralized ICT which were shared among many agencies and users, often in

Government owned subsidiaries. Government thus had their own data in their own basement.

Even today the mainframe is still being used many places – often because it is exorbitant in

terms of cost to migrate to another platform – many stories has been told of customers how

had to shop spare parts on eBay as the hardware support was long gone.

In the 1990’ the desktop revolution had taken over – but still there was a need for

Governments to ensure standardized deployment and update – which could be tricky to


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establish on a national level in a client-server (desktop) model. Hence the ASP (Application

Service Provision) was born. This had limited success – the process of turning “client-server”

into a hosted/shared reality was complicated – how do you make a desktop (Windows) piece

of Software into a multitenant hosted reality. One of the companies I worked with had invented

a process of separating desktop-applications, so that they could be hosted. This process was

called “washing” the application.

In mid 2000’ utility pricing and utilization gained speed. The idea was that why buy a powerful

it-installation when you only occasionally needed to have peak performance? What if you could

buy capacity as you bought electricity and water? With cloud computing many of the learning’

and skill’ from the past have been consolidated into one standardized vision around how to

procure ICT. You can either procure the raw iron, Infrastructure (Infrastructure as a service:

IaaS), you can buy a platform (Platform as a service, PaaS) or you can buy the applications

and solutions that you need (Software as a service, SaaS). Among the more advanced

services are data services where content (or information) are provided utilizing the cloud – like

Netflix, Dropbox, Oracle Social Cloud and YouTube (Data as a service, DaaS).

The figure below reflects on the different delivery models. But furthermore there is a “integra-

tion” component that really didn’t exist from 1960 – 2000: The Internet. As everything is

internet-enabled it really doesn’t matter where data resides from a technology point of view

(from a concerned citizens and public sector employee point of view this is a completely differ-

rent matter, as we later will discuss). Hence a service for a citizen can be “composed” or

“orchestrated” by multiple services seamlessly integrated and sharing data spanning multiple

countries.


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5 Myths with respect to Public Sector use of Cloud.

As cloud is still relatively new, there is a lot of hype, but also a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty

and Doubt). So to clarify I would like to address 5 myths on cloud that are widespread among

Public Sector business and technology leaders.

Myth #1: Everything Will Go to the Public Cloud

From a Public Sector point of view it is getting a bit tricky, because the Public Cloud is

somewhat the opposite of a cloud for Public Sector. There are basically three ways cloud

services can be provided: a) Private, ie. a cloud in your own basement (or a trusted

Government private cloud for multiple agencies), b) Public, ie. anyone can buy a piece of the

cake (the IaaS, PaaS, SaaS or DaaS), or c) Hybrid between private and public.

Most cloud implementations for Public Sector/Governments today are private clouds –

everything around access, maintenance etc. is determined by the Government, and the cloud

is private. This is generally consistent with the world trend, in which Private Cloud is growing

the fastest.

Still there is a huge pool of “Non-cloud” but the clear tendency is that over the next years that

will drop significantly – while the above is for companies, Public Sector is likely to follow this

pattern, but the transformation will be slower, and the increase in “cloudification” will happen as

a combination of non-cloud on premise, private cloud and public cloud. This will it is own rights

create a number of challenges for both the CIO’s of Public Sector, the integrators and the

solution cloud providers, as the complex puzzle has to be orchestrated and solved.


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Myth #2: You’re Either Cloud or You’re Not.

Jumping to the conclusion in the above paragraph: Governments will almost certainly need to

solve the complex puzzle of co-existence of on-premise, private and public cloud that needs to

interact seamlessly not only for the business user, but also for IT.

So enabling cloud is an evolution – a journey where the past mix with the future. The aim is to

make the componentized enterprise functional architecture (CEFA, see the section a bit later)

over time operate with as much public cloud as possible in order to maximize cost, scalability

and operational efficiency. But for a foreseeable future Public Sector organizations will have to

utilize a hybrid model encompassing all past models of service digitalization.

The path of development is to identify the areas of consolidation and which areas can be dealt

with in the private cloud, and then expand non-risk areas to the private cloud. Building the

business case around the transformational path should also include considerations around it-

security as well as business resilience, as unavailability of one core component in the CEFA

might render the entire operation inoperable.


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Myth #3: Clouds Are One Size Fits All

Cloud is often seen as one thing “the cloud”, but reality is that there is a growing segregation of

services depending on what ones requirements are:

The different types of cloud offerings reflect different user needs. If you need to have access to

databases and computational power, the Infrastructure service (IaaS) would be the choice,

while providing a full-fledged Social Service application to the end-user would require multiple

pieces of Software to collaborate as a Service, why SaaS would be the answer.

As said the world of cloud is still unfolding, but the clear ambition of Oracle is to be the leading

provider of holistic cloud services and cloud solutions. While there are no full-fledged Social

Security or Social Welfare solution running in the cloud today, the clear ambition is to enable

initially a private cloud, and later a public cloud, solution cloud encompassing all the functional

requirements utilizing cloud building blocks using the CEFA architectural mindset.


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Myth #4: Cloud Will Lock You In

Public Sector has probably been among the most challenged by vendor lock-in over the years.

Vendor lock-in happens when an organizations are so dependent on a specific software or

hardware that costs of moving away becomes exorbitant. Over the years vendor lock-in was

promised to diminish as more and more global standards of interfaces, data exchange and

generally interoperability became more widespread, but recently a number of Governments

has uncritically or even cursorily embraced Open Source and solution development based on

in-house, home-build strategies without thorough evaluation of all the parameters in the

business case3.

But with cloud a number of the past challenges fades away, as the different cloud

implementations has the same architecture, the same standards and the same products

beneath the solution. Of course migration between cloud vendors will still be a challenge, but

at Oracle we are involved in a number of standardization initiatives to enable cloud

interoperability and coherence across cloud services. Within the Social Security and Pension

Administration domain, we are part of the International Social Security Association (ISSA’s)

initiative to standardize the requirements on interoperability and data among the global

vendors of Social Security solutions. Cloud interoperability is part of the discussions as well.

3 I can recommed my own text book chapter on how Governments should evaluate Open Source compared to Commercial of the Shelf (COTS): Evaluating Open Source in Government: Methodological Considerations in Strategizing the Use of Open Source in the Public Sector

http://www.igi-global.com/chapter/evaluating-open-source-government/27812

http://www.igi-global.com/chapter/evaluating-open-source-government/27812


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Myth #5: Reducing Cost Is the Biggest Benefit of Cloud

As mentioned before the 2000’ had a lot of focus on utility pricing – why not use/consume and

pay for IT as one would consume and pay for water or electricity? This notion makes many

think that the benefit of Cloud is only in terms of cost savings. And true – there are much to be

saved by sharing hardware and software, not only in terms of $$$, but also in terms of human

resources needed and ecologically, as power consumption per user everything else equal,

would be lower due to much better utilization of the used technologies.

But there are more benefits from the cloud than just the green effect and the cost saving.

Elasticity is used to describe how capacity can be provided on demand – when needed, one

has the extra processing power. For Social Security agencies that often happens when new

initiative in terms of benefits are announced, and all citizens want to check if they are eligible –

in such a situation scalability of the solution comes in handy. In the past the peak load often

determined the operational design – which lead to massive idle time and hence wasted

money4. Another value-add is speed. Speed in terms of general access (if you have to create a

new environment for testing, you could spend months, while provisioning a cloud service

literally take minutes), speed in terms of access to highest performing ICT infrastructure

(Oracle is #1 in terms of TPC-C Benchmarks globally5) and speedy update/maintenance.

4 Ten years ago a Public Sector agency with more than 10.000 users all had to do time-registering in the same 15-minute window every week – the consequence was the most expensive “super-computer” was bought and only provided work for those 15 minutes.

5 Oracle’ results at TPC-C Benchmarks: http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp

http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp


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The diverse view of the benefits of the cloud also comes clear when one asks decision

makers on which benefits they deem most important when considering cloud. As the below

figure indicates, business agility – flexibility to deploy new services and functions – followed by

better use of resources are among the key benefits of using cloud. There is no reason why this

should not resonate among Public Sector organizations as well.

Cloud and Privacy Protection

One of the biggest challenges of Public Sector use of Cloud is the fear that sensitive

information will be disclosed and accessed by unauthorized people. And this is a real fear –

but it has little to do with cloud as such. If we have a private cloud implementation for a

Government that would normally run out of a datacenter placed in their own country. As such

there is not much difference between a private cloud and a hosted or BPO (Business Process

Outsourcing) solution. Still the “local” solution will have the same vulnerabilities regardless of

its deployment as the “global” as the core interconnectivity infrastructure is the Internet – and

there will still be the risk of an insider who wants to tap information for personal gains or

collusion with an outsider. Tools like GRC and extensive audit and logging is required as well.

The general view is that from an investment point of view it is more efficient to harden a single

datacenter with state-of-the-art technologies and it-security, including advanced Governance,

Risk and Compliance, while doing the same for multiple smaller installations can be exorbitant

expensive. Hence consolidation and utilization of cloud services could bring down the cost of

protecting vital information.

Many countries have a number of laws that restricts certain information to leave the country or

to have them on record “at home” in case of war. Furthermore there exist elaborate regulation


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on data protection and privacy protection. I can’t stress enough how important it is to think

holistically and evaluate all steps in the chain before deploying solutions, as the cost of change

during design is factor 1, during development is factor 10-100, and during

deployment/operation is 100-1000.

Protecting sensitive information around the citizens are becoming more and more a daily issue

for Public Sector leaders. It might not be the most thrilling assignment to design the “roles and

responsibilities” and to ensure segregation of duties, but the time spend is well spend, as it will

help prevent massive breaches.

Especially the Social Security agencies are being targeted by cybercriminals as access to

personal identification information can enable them to commit cyber-fraud in terms of identity

theft. There has been a number of cases where slack in IT-security has provided access to

core personal ID / Social Security numbers6. But IT-security issues are not the only challenges

that Social Security agencies have to battle. As described in the Oracle White Paper on EFC

(Error, Fraud and Corruption)7 a number of issues around collusion and fraud have

increasingly hit Social Welfare agencies.

Cloud technologies can make it much more difficult to pinpoint who to collude with in order to

manipulate internal systems, as the cloud basically is “in the cloud” – on the other hand that is

the exact challenge that Public Sector has with the Public Cloud – it is difficult to say where

information is actually stored and computed (in the future ubiquitous cloud world), why data

protection agencies can’t deem if data has been handled in accordance with regulations.

Cloud Recommendations for Public Sector

Given that there are a number of restrictions, how can agencies begin evaluating and work

with cloud? We believe that this is a ladder – and that Governments need to take a step-by-

step approach. Of course – if a national cloud paradigm for Public Sector / all of Government is

established as a proprietary Private Cloud for Governments (like it is happening in UK and

US), it is quite easy as the business case and evaluation to go for the cloud is provided and

agreed.

In order to use the Public Cloud – and hence get the most cost-effective, most flexible and

fastest capabilities, Governments and Social Security Agencies need to carefully analyze the

6 In 2012-2013 hackers gained access to the IBM mainframe storing all 5.5 mio. Danish Citizens ID. In 2007 UK lost track of 25 mio. citizens Social Security numbers as they shipped them on a CD in the mail.

7 ISSA technical Seminar, 2012, Madrid: http://www.issa.int/details?uuid=abc3d531-6300-49a4-8708-a5edc82ef7e8

http://www.issa.int/details?uuid=abc3d531-6300-49a4-8708-a5edc82ef7e8

http://www.issa.int/details?uuid=abc3d531-6300-49a4-8708-a5edc82ef7e8


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information that they want to store in the cloud – in order to respect the data privacy issues as

well as the regulatory constraints on where Public Sector information should be stored.

There are a number of areas where Social Security Agencies could use the Public Cloud:

1) DaaS Services – getting access to 3rd

party information and collected information

(publicly available information) on the Social Media. Social Security Agencies are

considering to use these data services to validate eligibility of information provided by

citizens to fight benefit fraud and to detect early, schemes for fraudulent processes

and claims.

2) Analytics Cloud Services – number crunching and advanced analytics without trace

back to the individual citizen. Both in terms of providing geo-social knowledge on

penetration of benefit schemes and in analyzing gender, educational and other factors

that might be useful in deciding new policy for the social security benefits. The

masking of information (or decoupling with Social Security ID) will be required before

using the Analytics Cloud Service.

3) Marketing Cloud – to direct and trace campaigns towards defined groups of citizens,

like elder, social security recipients with 2 or more children, etc, Marketing Cloud tools

could be used. Furthermore it would be possible to (in the back-office, on-premise

system) to see who have seen the announcement, who responded when, did they

share with their own social network, and a number of other KPI’s around the

effectiveness of the campaign.

4) Eligibility Screening in the cloud – to provide citizens with knowledge and insight on

whether they qualify (are eligible) for specific social benefits or not, the Social Security

agency can provide a screening service where the same rules that would determine

eligibility in the case management system, are made available for the citizen.

To see how this work, we have “digitized” the current food benefit rules for US

(SNAP/TANF) and deployed this as an app (either iOS or Android) – free download of

the app called “OPA” (Oracle Policy Automation) from the respective stores.

5) Transparency on decisions – many Government organizations maintains a library of

past decisions from complaint boards and legal proceedings are stored in order to

ensure “rule of law” on future decisions in similar cases. Using Knowledge

Management cloud services, these repositories can be made available not only to the

case workers but also to the general public in order to create further transparency of

administrative practices and guidelines.

Generally if citizen specific (individual) information access is required, one needs to embrace a

hybrid solution where citizens identification is masked and stored locally utilizing pseudonyms.


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Oracle’ Strategy for Social Welfare and Human Services.

Social services programs are continuously changing and have grown increasingly complex—

and budgets are tighter than ever. Agencies must increase their efficiency while minimizing

overhead and optimizing their use of resources to help individuals and families in need.

Traditional mainframe-based systems simply can’t meet the demands of today’s social

services agencies. These aging proprietary systems create isolated silos of information that

make it dif¬ficult to manage the complex caseloads that frequently involve multiple services

and programs, and complicate the process of getting the big-picture view of case progress and

outcomes across all services and programs.

Social services agencies require IT solutions that are much more flexible, adaptable, and cost

effective than the legacy systems they have in place. This means implementing a complete

technology platform that integrates all necessary components—from the underlying database,

to the middleware, to the user-facing applications. To minimize costs and optimize

interoperability with existing legacy systems, such a platform needs to be built using open

standards. Most important, any solution must support agencies’ requirements for managing

individual social services programs and services with a design that focuses on the individual

client—while providing an integrated view across programs and services.

Oracle’s Social Services Solution delivers all this and more. By providing a complete,

integrated platform that supports case management, human resources, financial management

and procurement, content and identity management, and business intelligence, Oracle’s Social

Services solution improves program delivery and client outcomes, manages policy complexity

to ensure compliance with rules and legislation, and reduces risk and administrative cost while

increasing responsiveness to change.


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In recent years, politicians have introduced new policies at an increasing rate. Ministers often

stay in one job for less than two years, and are understandably keen to make their mark

quickly by both announcing policy changes and implementing them in a short time. But the ICT

systems that support these policies have generally prevented changes being implemented as

quickly as politicians would like. Legislative policy changes have to be made by a mandatory

deadline, thus applying more pressure to over-stretched IT resources.

Many frustrations are expressed by policy-makers that ICT does not deliver effective or timely

policy changes, while IT feels that it does not get a clear enough definition of the changes

required. The problem is particularly acute in the areas of taxation and social security, because

these are the areas where the State is usually directly responsible for both Policy and

Operations.

Oracle’s vision for Social Services is to provide a platform for the current and the future that

creates a life-cycle view of the citizen and reduces complexity for both the citizen and the

public sector employee.

Although the capability of ICT technology continues to develop rapidly with many useful new

tools and architectures, more often than not the approach in Government is to continue to

focus on increasing the efficiency of the administrative systems.


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Large budget-eating legacy systems discourage innovative approaches and they become

serious barriers to change. You often hear that “we cannot do this or that with our systems”,

despite the fact that all agree that “this or that” are desirable things to do from a policy

perspective. The equivalent in a manufacturing company would be to focus on administration

and not on how to target its products to a constantly changing market place. This is often the

reality of the Public Sector today and yet this will need to change significantly with the fiscal

crunch if service levels are to be maintained or improved. This has seemed to be an intractable

problem.

The Oracle Social Service Solution Enterprise Architecture is a response to how to solve the

problem. By combining the functional capabilities that we, during the last 5 years, acquired

through investment in companies and in product development and product innovation, we have

created a holistic vision and solution capability that solves squaring the circle.

Service-Oriented Architecture for Social Services.

Securing swift and well-working services for the citizens and at the same time enable the

organization to move towards a higher degree of efficiency and effectiveness is by many

considered to be the ultimate bliss. Our strategy on providing functional Social Services

building blocks (or Lego-bricks) enables a path to achieve these goals. Not only because

almost everything is based on agreed standards and Commercial of the shelf (COTS) building

blocks, best practices harvested from leading Social Services and Pension Administrations

around the world, but also because the solution fundamentally change the way that policy

changes are implemented in the future solution – bringing forward efficiency and effectiveness

in a previously unprecedented way.

One might think that fitting multiple components together is vastly more complex than just

buying “something” that claims to have done all of that. The problem with monolithic systems is

that all the functional elements become so interlocked that replacing a non-performing part is

impossible. Furthermore no one can claim fame on every hill - there is no such thing as a silver

bullet fixing all business and operational challenges in a nice gift wrapping. The best strategy is

to build an interoperable enterprise architecture comprising of best-of-breed building blocks

from a functional point of view. And this is the essence of Oracle’s Industry strategy and the

CEFA.

We have tried to balance the current situation and the future needs in the construction of the

enterprise architecture. Functionality can be shifted, upgraded or replaced with the least

possible impact. We believe that the Social Welfare Public Sector organizations are facing a

number of hard choices – some of the mega-trends (demographics, the financial conditions,

the citizens e-awareness and e-readiness etc.) defines or spans the space within an

organizations can optimize their operation.


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We have developed an enterprise architecture comprised of standardized, off-the-shelf

products that integrates. This gives the flexibility to extend the architecture with new

functionality or new functional areas as well as to include and respect already existing

technologies in the enterprise architecture.

Our solution architecture for Social Services comprises of key functional areas that are tailored

explicitly to specific business requirements – the Siebel Case Management provides

capabilities to handling cases, the rules and policy engine (Oracle Policy Automation) enables

efficiency of implementing rules and the ERP-component – Oracle E-Business Suite – enables

general ledger, accounts payable and payment fulfillment. Fusion Middleware provides

business process flows and data-interoperability, while Oracle Hardware enables price-

performance beyond any competitor.

Every puzzle piece is addressing key business and functional requirements, while maintaining

high updateability and scalability due to the commercial-off-the-shelf requirement. As an

example the National Danish Child at Risk system (DUBU) is 89% out-of-the-box mixing

Oracle technologies – like Siebel and Oracle Policy Automation – and third party technology

(DB2 and Tivoli).

The business and enterprise architecture that we use as a blueprint for social welfare

organizations ideal ICT-solution, respects investments already done in infrastructure and

niche-solutions. If you already have a well-working ERP system, why then replace it? The best

option is to integrate into the solution map (enterprise architecture) and understand how to

make the proper integrations. Needless to say, Oracle have out-of-the-box standard

integrations to a vast number of 3rd party system.

Case Management is basically the spine of public sector administration – this is where all the

information is aggregated and the right decisions can be taken based on transparent subset of

information. Regardless of the interface used to key in information – whether it is through a

webpage as self-service, a back-office screen or through integration with other data-suppliers,

the ability to hold metadata is the pivotal strength of the case management system. Besides

that a high number of standardized workflows and processes are available on-the-fly or out-of-

the-box which gives a very high degree of readiness from day one in the implementation

phase.

Case management components further more allow the users to gain insight to the nature of

metadata – this is extremely relevant if one want to follow the amount of cases, the turn-

around time for an application, to identify bottlenecks in the workflow process and to enable

self-service functionalities for citizens around their case – why not have a service where by

providing credentials, the citizen can see case status is, and what the average time to resolve

such a case would be? Such features are of course also available in the supporting call-center

where call-center employees easily can check status / progress and add information from the

citizens.


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Rule engines have the ability to take the written policy – in almost any language – and under-

stand the rules – what is need by the business analyst that enters the rules is a 2-days training

in how to use the marking tools – but basically the policy imported from Word or Excel will look

exactly as before – but will now be “computable” or usable for the Case management system.

An organization is able to allow the business people to maintain the business rules: no IT

involvement, no coding, no expensive consultants or programmers needed to change the

changing rules.

The Componentized Enterprise Functional Architecture (CEFA)

“No government have the same set-up, hence the same solution is not possible”-myth is

widespread among public sector leaders. The essence that every country have its own

policies, its own enforcement etc., is perfectly true – but when it comes to digitalization

technology innovation have significantly changed the reality. Now governments can utilize the

same basic solution platform – with the same generic technology components – and

implement functional services with different policies and regulations in such a manner that

modification of business rules can happen on a day-to-day schedule compared to last decade’

year-to-year schedule.

The significant changes have been brought about by a combination of trends and directions.

Firstly there is a clear trend to separate “process” from “policy” – and this has been supported

with the overall technology innovations around COTS and Rules Engines.

The Oracle Social Service solution is a pre-packaged solution architecture based on best-of-

breed functional components. The solution is implemented and in operation in a number of

organizations world-wide. The approach that Oracle have to solution development is, that


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customers should have as much choice as possible, and as much flexibility as possible. The

approach we have chosen is CEFA – Componentized Enterprise Functional Architecture. Our

solution is based on functional components that integrate completely through our Integration

Architecture.

The core benefits of such an approach is:

Customer gets access to best-of-breed technologies.

Customer can reuse already existing solutions / technologies – if the existing

document management system is well working, it can be fitted into the Componentized

Enterprise Functional Architecture (CEFA) as a component.

New releases of components can be updated / implemented without the risk of re-

implementation of the full solution.

The core components in the stack are Siebel and Oracle Policy Automation which together

with our business intelligence component makeq the application foundation. The technical

integration architecture is based on our Fusion Middleware product stack and Oracle

Database.

In the final architectural design it is possible to add a number of other components which other

customers in Social Service have used to optimize their operation. This could include tools like

Oracle Spatial which enable geo-societal visualization and analysis, WebCenter Content,

which is virtualizing paper and paper-based communication between citizens and public

authorities (C2G) and between G2G and B2G.

Addressing all key functionalities in the solution will be too overwhelming for this introduction,

but we are providing below a description of the core application for case management and the

strategies that Oracle is pursuing.

Separating policies from processes

A high number of governments around the world strive to reduce costs and heighten efficiency.

They are all looking on how to become more automated. This not only makes decisions more

transparent, but also ensures that fraud and error is brought to a minimum. Furthermore it

enables the business side of the organization to take control of how to deploy changes in rules

and regulations.

Hence, one of the clear megatrends of today is that separation of “process” and “policy” has to

take place. One has to separate what is static (the business processes) from what is dynamic

(the rules/policies). This highly affects maintainability as policy can be mastered by business

people in Word-documents and implemented by the business people in the operational

systems without the traditional use of programming – reducing it from months/weeks to hours


20

in changing a given policy. At the same time efficiency and the ability to act transformational in

monitoring impact of policies have become much easier.

Governments can use policies to steer / guide the behavior of citizens in a way which is still to

be developed. As a consequence of IT-implementation costs and man-hours needed at case

workers to process complex regulation and policies, many governments have sought to make

rules manageable rather than fair and simple rather than complex. Many policy regimes have

thus been biased away from the optimal formulations of rules as these would become

unmanageable and incomputable. This is not the case today – the rules engines, which in

natural language understand business rules, can help compute and develop – as well as tests

and simulate – new rules and regulations prior to deployment and hence instigate a much

higher degree of effectiveness in the formulation of policies.

A Rule engine – like Oracle Policy Automation – has the ability to take the written policy – in

almost any language – and understand the rules – what is need by the business analyst that

enters the rules is a 2-days training in how to use the marking tools – but basically the policy

imported from Word or Excel will look exactly as before – but will now be “computable” or

usable for the Case management system. An organization is able to allow the business people

to maintain the business rules: no IT involvement, no coding, no expensive consultants or

programmers needed to change the changing rules.

Social Welfare – and especially Social Security organizations are experience high gains from

using this kind of technology to empower their operation. In Sweden (at the Social Security

Agency – Försäkringskassan) a dental benefit scheme have digitized 25.000 lines of code –

and while it in the past took 4 weeks to get an application processed it today takes 1-2

seconds. Furthermore as this is an automated system, neither wrong decisions nor the ability

to influence a case worker is possible.

One of the clear megatrends of today is that separation between process and policy has to

take place. By doing this one separate what is static (the business processes) from what is

dynamic (the rules/policies). This highly affects maintainability as policy can be mastered by

business people in Word-documents and implemented by the business people in the

operational systems without the traditional use of programming – reducing it from weeks to

hours in changing a given policy. At the same time efficiency and the ability to act

transformational in monitoring impact of policies have become much easier.

Governments can use policies to steer / guide the behavior of citizens in a way which is still to

be developed. As a consequence of IT-implementation costs and man-hours needed at case

workers to process complex regulation and policies, many governments have sought to make

rules manageable rather than fair and simple rather than complex. Many policy regimes have

thus been biased away from the optimal formulations of rules as these would become

unmanageable and incomputable. This is not the case today – the rules engines, which in

natural language under-stand business rules, can help compute and develop – as well as tests


21

and simulate – new rules and regulations prior to deployment and hence instigate a much

higher degree of effectiveness in the formulation of policies.

The key building blocks are what makes up the enterprise architecture – and is working

perfectly in coexistence with existing blocks, and hence preserving prior investments in

technology. Sometime existing old technology building blocks will be replaced by new blocks –

but components like Oracle Policy Automation have the ability to help migration of old code in

mainframe environments.

Commercial of the Shelf (COTS)

More and more Governments have realized that the traditional way of building their own

software stack would be a thing of the past. The risk of building complete systems based on

very specific requirements have for many Governments lead to failed projects with significant

overspending.

As a consequence organizations are often asking themselves how much of their requirements

can be fulfilled by utilizing a COTS strategy. And they are often surprised when they realize

that the maturity and embedded complexity almost match their requirements out of the box. In

the past, the question of build versus buy was a theoretical versus debate for the social

services market because commercial off-the-shelf software products were not available.8

The key building blocks are what makes up the enterprise architecture – and is working

perfectly in coexistence with existing blocks, and hence preserving prior investments in

technology. Sometime existing old technology building blocks will be replaced by new blocks –

but components like Oracle Policy Automation have the ability to help migration of old code in

mainframe environments.

Oracle has a strong focus on delivering COTS solutions to the social services market. Oracles

Commercial of the Shelf solutions are build on industry best practice, and Public Sector

Institutions can yield huge savings and efficiencies from utilizing COTS. What makes COTS

applicable for Governments? Basically three things: Committed use of Open Standards,

Inclusion of Best Practice and Establishing an Ecosystem of Future Solution Influencers.

8 Accenture/Oracle Whitepaper, Examining the Total Cost of Ownership for Social Service Case Management.


22

Open Standards

We believe that ICT should be interoperable. Hence we use Open Standards and de-facto

industry standards, as a fundamental design parameter in our solutions. This enables us to

quickly put together solutions that can adhere to existing system investments and co-exist – or

even enable easier future integration and interoperability with Oracle and 3rd party

components in the Enterprise Architecture. The use of Open Standards reduces risks and

maximizes the value of the overall system environment.

Learn from others – use good practices

We strongly believe that sharing and including as much knowledge from the ecosystem when

we do solution development is the only way forward. We thus interlink our own industry experts

with customers, partners and international organizations to gain insight and business

knowledge of how the functionality of social service of tomorrow would look like. Which

business requirements are needed to support social service organizations and to make them

perform as best as possible? Which requirements are expected to be demanded from the

citizens on the user interface of self-service enablement?

Ecosystem for Influencers.

Oracle believes that we have some of the most talented and innovative ICT-people who

together with staff from acquisition of new technologies (their inventors), will continue to

provide the best and most innovative solutions for Governments. But we reject sitting in the

ivory tower and think we know everything. We don’t.


23

This is why we have established a clear governance model for future identification and solving

new business issues in the public sector with ICT, involving a full range of stakeholders in a

virtual ecosystem as visualized in the figure below.

Ora

cle

Ind

ust

ry E

xpe

rtis

e

Examine trends and directions

Act as bridge between coding and specification of functionalities

Conduct Strategy Management & Industry Insights. P

artn

ers

/ S

ys. I

nte

grat

ors

Have hands on experience – understand the integration complexities

Combining Management Consulting and Implementation

Pu

blic

Se

cto

r C

lien

ts

Asks for new functionality across products.

Requests enhancements, integrations and functionalities

Share thoughts, visions, experiences through Client Advisory Board

Inte

rnat

ion

al S

take

ho

lde

rs

Collection of best / good practise

Dialog and influence on technical committees and bodies.

Dialog and collaboration with organizations like ISSA and WAPES – for sharing strategies and outcomes.


24

Conclusion

Public Sector is a key business area for Oracle. And hence we are committed to continue to

innovate and assist Public Sector execution. With Oracle Governments and Social Service

agencies gets a partner that can help with digitalization across all ICT disciplines – from

operation of infrastructure either as on premise or as a cloud offering to designing the

componentized enterprise functional architecture for next generation social security system

utilizing existing in-house components combined with state-of-the-art IaaS, Paas, and SaaS

cloud services.

Using a platform from Oracle provide flexibility and protects existing investments. Our key

elements – on which we build all public sector specific solutions – from Child Welfare in

Denmark and Australia, over Social Security in the Netherlands and Morocco to Elder and

Handicap Care in Sweden and Spain – is Rules and Policy Enablement, Case Management,

Business Intelligence, Web-front-end and Interoperable Business Process Backend and

Integration layer (Middleware) knitted together with strong enterprise resource planning

capabilities delivered either on premise or in the cloud – or in a hybrid deployment model.

At Oracle we believe that COTS is the best way forward to create systems that match business

needs, and citizens demand with reliable and fast-changeable ICT. We believe that industry

specific solution can be build by standard-software utilizing a strong Enterprise Architecture. If

people want to build a bespoke system or base it on in-house Open Source development – or

will customize / adapt an existing system to your needs, you ought to ask for a second opinion.

We believe that our Social Service Lifecycle Value Approach combined with our Social Service

Enterprise Architecture componentized model (CEFA), makes a solid foundation for next

generation of platforms for Social Services Delivery. And as said – the platform and the

architecture is not a “buy everything”, there are multiple starting points – if the old mainframe

systems can’t cope anymore, a Platform Modernization starting point would be optimal – if

politicians complaint on long implementation time for new legislation, the “Closed Loop Policy

Modernization” might be a good starting point etc.


25

Oracle and Public Sector

We can proudly state that Public Sector is among the most important industries for Oracle – in

fact, our customer number 1 more than 30 years ago was a public sector customer seeking

state-of-the-art database technology. Since then Oracle has become one of the most

successful providers of business solutions for Public Sector, continuously adding functionality

and capability to the solutions for Public Sector.

Our aim is to provide platforms on which public sector organizations can build their back- and

front-office operations. These platforms are orchestrated using functional requirements forming

a strong business enterprise architecture, which incorporate a high number of the innovations

and investments that Oracle have been doing over the last 5-7 years. Our list of references in

Public Sector and Social Service is vast – we have been involved in building next generation

solutions several places around the world – and we have deployed hardware, databases,

middleware and applications together or as individual products.

Like with all our customers we try to listen and learn from public sector and we transform our

solutions to public sector needs through a number of interactions with Public Sector. Our goal

is to become the preferred platform for Public Sector digitalization. As part of our continued

commitment to Public Sector we seek your guidance, insight and advice. As we continue to

develop and invest in technologies that can empower the citizens in self-service, reduce fraud

and error or make public sector policy orchestration more smooth and efficient, we interact with

international forums and organizations (like ISSA and WAPES), and partners and customers

as well as academics and other peers knowledgeable of the transformation and digitalization of

public sector.

\ Social Services and Error, Fraud and Corruption

October 2014

Author: Christian Wernberg-Tougaard,

Global Lead, Social Welfare & Human Services

Director, Industry Expert Group for Public Sector.

[email protected]

@digitizeSociety

www.linkedin.com/in/christianwernbergtougaard/

Oracle Corporation

World Headquarters

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Redwood Shores, CA 94065

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Worldwide Inquiries:

Phone: +1.650.506.7000

Fax: +1.650.506.7200

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