A simulation model for quality assurance of e-governance projects

Abstract

The use of e-Governance applications for the wellbeing of citizens are increasing day to day. The Government is trying to bring accuracy, availability and transparency in the system for providing services to the public at low cost. Thus the Government to Government (G2G), Government to Citizens (G2C), Government to Business (G2B) and Government to Employees (G2E) services are strengthened with use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Digital India Programme was formulated by Government of India for delivering effective e-Governance services in the country. Still, the sustainability, security, availability and reliability of government services is a question to-day. Many e-Governance applications are failing and some others are partially successful. Even successful e-Governance applications need improvements in service delivery, interoperability and longevity. The hassle free integration of different applications is yet to be achieved. The applications working in silo increases redundancy and result in wastage of resources. For optimal usage of resources and provisioning of services to the right person at right time, standardisation of e-Governance services is essential. Lot of standards for quality control and quality assurance are already available in different service areas including ICT. Besides international standards in Software Engineering, the Government of India emphasizes on e-Governance standards, interoperability framework, quality assurance framework, metadata & data standards and other areas to reduce failure and improvising the channels of service delivery to the public. The participation of users in governance is also encouraged to improve the quality of service. This paper focuses on provisioning a Simulation model for effective measurement of sector wise quality as well as the total quality assurance of the e-Governance projects. For an e-Governance application, in addition to software quality, the process quality, data quality and managerial quality sectors are also need to be taken care of for better result. The Simulation model will help in measuring the quality more accurately with qualitative and quantitative parameters and establish the relationship among different quality sectors of an e-Governance application. Consequently, it would be helpful in reducing the failure of e-Governance projects and create confidence in the stakeholders’ mind.