Toward an Anti-fragile e-Government System

Abstract

Design is the process of defining a system's components, interfaces, data formats, data flows, and data storage solutions that together satisfy specified availability, perfor-mance, and scalability requirements. Chapter 4 introduced four design principles— modularity, weak links, redundancy, and diversity—and a single operational princi-ple, fail fast, to achieve anti-fragility to a class of incidents. Chapter 5 showed how Netflix implemented the five principles to implement a media streaming system with anti-fragility to downtime. To investigate the generality of the five principles, the following two chapters investigate the design of systems to determine how they can be redesigned to achieve a degree of anti-fragility to downtime. Here, we first study the Norwegian electronic government (e-government) system Altinn as it appeared in 2012 to better understand why it is advantageous to base the design of anti-fragile web-scale systems on fine-grained service-oriented architec-tures (SOAs) in public clouds with scalable and distributed data storage. This study is partly based on two analyses of Altinn commissioned by the Norwegian Ministry of Trade and Industry [57, 58]. Next, we consider the United Kingdom's e-government system to understand the need for user-focused and iterative development to support both rapid change and high availability. Finally, we discuss whether a nation should have a single e-government system running many services or multiple independent and diverse systems running a few services each. 6.1 The Norwegian e-Government System The Norwegian government has made a large and sustained effort to develop world-leading e-government services for both citizens and companies [59]. Applications, invoicing, appointments, and various types of reports are all handled electronically. These digital services run on the Altinn platform. Sensitive personal information such as tax data are sent over the Internet to personal computing devices, including smartphones and tablets.