E-Gov methodology

2007-08-07

Stela Institute’s vision has always been linked to providing solutions to the concrete problems of society. In fulfilling this mission, internal competencies were formed, stimulated and grown thanks to the personal contribution of the Institute’s researchers and their individual projects. As innovation has always been the cornerstone of the Institute’s activities and research, specific competencies have been created to address and tackle specific challenges. The academic origin of researchers was fundamental for the definition of such work structure. After the consolidation of operation competencies within
the Institute, the next step was to choose a working structure that privileged research, development of products and provision of solutions for that area. Collaborators are assigned to cells according to their interests and competencies. Projects require the input of several cells, thus providing the necessary competencies for reaching the objectives.

This operational structure is open to the contribution of several researchers to the same project, always aimed at meeting clients’ needs and the topmost objective of the work: innovation translated in a novel product or service. Stela Institute operates mainly in the following areas: E-gov Methodology – This conceptual architecture for e-government platforms conceived by Stela Institute’s researchers takes into consideration the interest of all involved stakeholders. Application of this architecture solves two typical problems of government information management: lack of integration and poor quality of information. Built around a pyramidal concept, the bottom layer, Information Units, deals with the construction of schemas that allow future application systems to share common information.

Respecting the units of information defined in the first layer, second layer tackles the construction of information capture systems and repositories, storage, and management operations. Third layer handles the instruments to display information on the web, with search-engines and dynamic updating of information. The top layer is packed with knowledge systems designed to generate new knowledge from the information units, information systems, and web portals.

Knowledge Systems – Stela Institute expertise in the engineering and management of knowledge assets encompasses the capability to develop business intelligence (BI) tools, which generate strategic indicators to support decision making processes with the flexibility to accommodate changes to the process and to the strategy of the organization. Advanced search engines suggest refining search parameters to maximize result efficacy. Automatic text generation tools translate parameterized database information into natural language. Network analysis tools find non-evident new knowledge in the complex mesh of relationships. Avatars make interfaces more appealing. Domain ontologies and other information standards of representation give support to the construction of knowledge and information systems and platforms.

Competence Management – This methodology is meant to optimize productivity and competitiveness within organizations. In
Competence Management,, surveying professional profiles and mapping competences are key. It is necessary to know what each organization has and the dimension of its intended scope in order to identify its needs, shortcomings, and opportunities to best employ existing human resources. Stela Institute develops projects in this area by means of applied research and products for competence mapping and management in the three dimensions: Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes. The ISCurriculum Platform was the first project to become a product in the area of competence management . Used by dozens of Brazilian institutions and foreign partners, the platform focus on knowledge mapping by means of capture and management of curricular information.

Content Management System (CMS) – These systems allow for the management of information and presentation aspects of portals. The objective is to supply users with tools that enable them sharing information and updating content in a swift and easy way. Allied to these functionalities, the Institute has a research project on CMS with integrated web semantics, ontologies, social networks analysis, and communities of practice. Each portal on the network may provide the semantics on its pages through an ontology and write a new ontology or reuse parts of existing ontologies. CMSs make for a simpler administration of portals allowing non-specialists to create ontologies from the interface. Another feature of CMC is its application as supporter and facilitator of collaboration among communities of practice, made possible through a user friendly interface adapted to meet the needs of these communities. By aggregating knowledge systems to CMS, it is possible to present indicators that facilitate the analysis of cooperation and decision making by a community manager, in addition to expediting the organization and retrieval of documents and the identification of people and affinities networks. For this particular area, the Institute has developed ISPublish, a web tool that makes it easy and fast to organize and publish content.

Portal content updating and information management has never been easier for the organizations running this structure. System Development Frameworks – Taking into consideration the vast experience of our team in conducting large-scale projects, the objective of Stela Institute’s research and innovation is also aimed at the development of software. Common problems – such as low portability and adaptability to new technologies, the weak or total lack of support for use of good development practices – gave birth to a framework architecture for the development of interoperable technology-independent applications. This architecture is materialized in the ISFramework, a multiplatform, multilanguage library of components for the development of internet-executable (X-Internet) applications. Development with ISFramework allows for the late decision on development language, facilitates migration to a new technology, allows the same code to generate web and desktop applications, and grants software and hardware independence, since the application development does not depend on the implementation technology.

At Stela Institute, costs were down 50% to 70% and development time reduced between 60 – 80% with the use of ISFramework.

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