Preparing for Enabling "Unified Service Delivery on DIGIT"

[t-krishna-kumar]

Citizens have a need for availing Government Services seamlessly without having to worry about figuring out which department (which part of government) & which application offers the service they need.

A Typical National / Sub National government is likely to have Few hundred Applications which provide services to the citizen. These applications might be on different technologies built at different points in time. Its also possible that the same service can be rendered to a Citizen through differnt application (in in different cities/ states etc.). Also it is likely that each service may be linked to a different Payment Gateway.

A platform like DIGIT - has the potential to offer that for the Citizen through its POTENTIAL Capability to unify Service delivery with the varied application set at the back end or building new ones on top of it. It also is front running thought for "Single Government approach" undertaken by many adminstrations for their CItizenry.

With this background - how can we think of DIGIT Services enabling some of basic capabilities for this unified Service delivery. More might be needed as we learn - but below are some important ones for us to consider in the first round of consideration.

1) Single Sign-on - Users such as Citizens, Employees, Partners, Administrators, developers will be using the platform should get access to services from the platform itself - without having to login in separately into different sites, different applcations. Similarly service provider officials need access to tracking and their work without having to login / logout of applications.

While Single Sign-on is essentially is Authentication - but it needs to dovetail seamlessly into authorisation requirements needed for the multiple applications. This might place additional requirements on the platform capability to be that which orchestrates the different applications at the back end, without compromising security considerations.

Assuming that there is/ will be a Central User Registry enabled at the Naitona / Sub National govt level - we need to Imagine how can users avail services/ provide services without having to logging into multiple systems separately.

The mechanism of Authentication / Authorisation may be different for different sets of users and applications.

This particular use case. - will find takers in many other Governance related discussions we might have when engaging with potential partners on using DIGIT for PAN state / PAN Country / PAN service platform.

We can think of atleast 2 emergent sitiations
a) DIGIT itself being considered for Single Signon
b) DIGIT orchestrating the same by leveraging another Single-Singon Tool (often with some limiations)

The Long term will be to move towards situation (a)

Key Asks - how do we think of this and create a recommendation deck / specs for improving this capability on DIGIT.

2. Unified Payment Service -
   A platform like DIGIT has potential to offer "Payment (Receiving money)" as a service for many / all the Applications that governments might have. Also there is a need for giving choice to the Citizen a shortlisted set of Instuments/ Gateway choices with an ability to trace the moneys received back to a specific service / bank account as neededed by the entities.

The Value delivered will be greatly enhanced - if this can provide interface with Automatic reconciliations along departments/ services/ bank accounts etc.

This takes away huge amount of efforts in an area of low discipline / manual errors and high servicing cost

3. Potential to Authenticate documents or Credentialling - remains a good use case. A platform like DIGIT can enable stuff like

a) DIGITAL Signature for Authorized employees - who can sign official certiticates or make Approvals etc.
b) eSign (Aadhar enabled signature) for Citizens to authenticate their docuements they submit (instead of uploading singatured documents) etc.
c) For vendors to submit invoices and other authenticated documents etc.

We should Consider these things in the Technical Council towards evolution of newer version of DIGIT

Articulating and designing Specs around these well - will help us in our conversations and efforts with Non Urban use cases, Gov Stack related discussions.