I’ve re-worked the slide that I usually use of the Gateway. I’ll be using this in a couple of conferences that I have this week, one in Northern Ireland and one in Romania. Belfast I’ve been to before, but Bucharest is going to be a whole new place for me. I’m looking forward to it.
Anyway, the new slide tries to convey the need for two types of access to government back end systems, (1) for thin clients and (2) for fat clients (aka Accountancy or payroll systems etc). I don’t see anyone else in the world addressing these two needs with any degree of success on a cross-government basis (honourable achievers include the Australian Tax Office and the US IRS – but neither is cross-government). To do that, the theory is that one great piece of central infrastructure (the Gateway) is better than many departmental systems. On top of the Gateway you can initially layer rules engines and a variety of web services (say a payments engine, a secure mail server, a government-citizen text messaging service, an appointment reservation/booking systems etc) – but ultimately the Gateway-type system grows to include those too.
Here’s the picture:
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