Turkish National Agency Software Project

Acronym of the case:

TRNASP

Web address of the case:

http://online.ua.gov.tr

Country of the case:

Turkey

City/region:

Ankara

Posting Date:

10 December 2009

Last Edited Date:

28 December 2009

Author:

guverhan tascioglu (Turkish National Agency)

egovernment | Effectiveness | citizen and administrative service

Type of initiative

Strategic initiative

Case Abstract

European Union Education and Youth Programmes aim at promoting the level of education, mutual cooperation and civic awareness in education and youth sectors among member states and individuals in a multi-dimensional approach. In order to fulfill this objective, National Agencies in Countries belonging to these Programmes are established. The Turkish National Agency (The Center for European Union Education and Youth Programmes), which has been established as a related institution of the Turkish Prime Ministry State Planning Organization on January of 2002, is responsible for the coordination of two main EU programmes in Turkey, Lifelong Learning Program (LLP) and Youth in Action Program.

The Turkish National Agency Software Project (TRNASP), the central e-transformation project of the agency, has been initiated in 2008 and deployed in the first quarter of 2009. TRNASP, providing a significant contribution to Turkeyâ€™s e-transformation project and information society strategy, aims at creating a knowledge-base for EU Education and Youth Programmes that will increase the effectiveness and the impact of the programmes in the point of exploring, analyzing, learning and distribution of the knowledge gained through the programmes and improving the current application and administration processes.
As of 2007, the population of Turkey stood at 70.5 million with a growth rate of 1.04% per annum. The population is relatively young with 25.5 % falling within the 0-15 age bracket. With the awareness of the fact that turning this potential youth population into a knowledge society, a remarkable improvement both in EU Education and Youth policies and knowledge-based economy goals of Lisbon strategy was presented andÂ TRNASP has been designed to include the latest IT technologies and business strategies focusing on how to maximize the knowledge gained by the programmes and utilize this knowledge in education and youth sectors.

TRNASP distinguishes itself from the similar e-government applications in the point that it integrates online services with the internal processes with a strategic focus. In other words, TRNASP has extended the concept of â€œonline e-government servicesâ€ with â€œinteracted e-government servicesâ€ which stands for the user involvement in each phase of the governmentâ€™s business processes. With TRNASP, this is easily achieved since all the internal processes including accounting and operational information systems have been automated and adopted with the online services,Â

As it has so often been the case with the current e-government applications, TRNASP has also started with electronic application for e-government services, which is electronic project application in our case. Applications to different programs have been filtered with genuine algorithms and stored into the central knowledge database. Afterwards the projects are transferred to the internal business processes, which we also call it as â€œproject lifecycle management processâ€. At this period when there is a need for user input, system triggers the relevant processes and user level form becomes ready for input. As TRNASP also maintains a user interaction subsystem, the user is notified to fill in the required form. Receiving this user side information, TRNASP continues its internal business processes.Â

In order to extend our knowledge-base for further analysis, TRNASP collects information from different resources i.e. user applications, user data input during project lifetime, detailed log records about the projects, EU programs such as LLPLink and Youthlink, financial data from our financial unit, excel files, access files and etc. In order to create knowledge from those various information resources, a decision support system is adopted in TRNASP, which gives us detailed statistical data as part of an MIS function.

Description of the case

Domain

eGovernment

Topic

Efficiency & Effectiveness, Benchmarking | Inclusive eGovernment | Services for Citizens | User-centric Services

Sector

Education, Science and Research

Date

June to December 2008

Date operational

January 2009

Target Users

Target Users Description

The target users of TRNASP consist of three groups:
First group is the beneficiaries. This is the largest target group including all users from preschool students to aged adults. Students and teachers from all levels of education, instructors, employees and employers are all parts of this huge group of users. All educational institutions (schools of adult education, universities, vocational training institutions, etc), youth groups and civil society organizations are also covered in this group. These users all apply to the Turkish National Agency for Commissionâ€™s educational and youth programmes through TRNASP.
Another group is the pool of external experts, involving people from various professional expertise fields such as business, education, health etc. These external experts are chosen by the Turkish National Agency once in every three years. They execute the quality assessment of applications by using the online evaluation module of TRNASP.
The internal experts are the staff ofÂ theTurkish National Agency and they execute the life cycle management of educational and youth projects via TRNASP, having full authorization on all evaluation and administration phases of these projects in the system.Â
Internal auditors of theTurkish National Agency will be able to extract whatever the data they need in graphs and images so as to assess the internal control structure and risks associated to the all programme phases run by the experts. In addition to this they can be able to use computer associated audit techniques (CAAT) over the data as part of financial audit. This will enable the auditors over all electronic transmissions without wasting time on hardcopies of the programme implementations.

Scope

National

Status

Operation

Language(s)

Turkish

Other

English

Policy Context and Legal Framework

We explain the issue in two different aspects, EU Policies and Local Policies:

EU Policies / Lisbon Goals: In the conclusions of the Lisbon meeting in March 2000, the European Council set the clear strategic goal for the European Union to become the most competitive knowledge-based society in the world by 2010. When a society becomes knowledge-based, it faces challenges on a variety of levels i.e. strategic decision making in knowledge-based environments, public policy adaptation etc. From this perspective, how can EU educations and youth programs be knowledge-based in order to contribute to Lisbon goals? We believe that this can be accomplished by building a knowledge management framework for those EU programs. By this way it is going to be possible to increase the effectiveness of the programmes with improved fast learning and new knowledge creation opportunities which lead to greater innovation, consistency in good practices, better project results and beneficiary satisfaction. One of the promising features of TRNASP is that it serves a knowledge management basis to the upper layer applications. With TRNASP, all the data embodied in different applications and databases have been restructured and located to a central knowledge database. Then all the business processes running on top of the architecture has been reengineered in order to use the same knowledge-base.

EU Programmes for Education, Training, Youth, Culture and Citizenship: The European Commission adopted ambitious proposals on 14 July for the next generation of EU programmes for the period 2007â€“2013 in education, training, culture, youth and citizenship. These have been approved by the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers, and in operation since the beginning of 2007. TRNASP is the central tool for Turkish National Agency that directly serves those EU programs in the fields such as electronic project application, electronic project evaluation, electronic project lifecycle management, electronic project budget management.

E-Europe and E-Europe+: In November 1999, the European Commission had already put forward its â€˜eEuropeâ€™ initiative precisely, both within the Union and in the candidate countries of Central and Eastern Europe. eEurope aims at ensuring that everyone in the European Union â€”every citizen, every school, every company, every administration â€” has access to the new information and communication technologies and exploits them as fully as possible. Turkey has also become a party to the eEurope+ Initiative, which has been designed for EU candidate countries in 2001.We can state that TRNASP has been clearly serving to e-Europe and e-Europe+ policies by providing services to the beneficiaries electronically. With TRNASP, all the EU Education and Youth Program applications have been performed electronically, including nearly 4800 applications.
Local Policy: e-Transformation Turkey Project and Turkish Information Society Strategy: The â€œe-Transformation Turkey Projectâ€ included in the 58th and 59th Government Urgent Action Plan was launched in 2003 and hence all individual studies being carried out in our country have been gathered under an umbrella project and accelerated. The e-Transformation Turkey Project aims to carry out the process of transformation into an information society in a harmonious and integrated structure serving all citizens, enterprises and public segments. In this process, TRNASP contributes to the following items on Turkeyâ€™s Information Society Transformation Policy;Part3.3: Citizen-Focused Service Transformation,Part3.4: Modernization in Public Administration.

TRNASP is also associated with items 704 and 705 of 9th Development Plan of Turkey, covering the subjects on integration of effective and transparent public services under a single portal and use of e-Government policies in restructuring of the public sector supported by flexible and interoperable services respectively.

Project Size and Implementation

Type of initiative

IT infrastructures and products

Overall Implementation approach

Public administration

Technology choice

Proprietary technology

Funding source

Public funding EU | Public funding national

Project size

Implementation: €49-299,000

Yearly cost:

€49-299,000

Implementation and Management Approach

The matter will be matter Â in two stages :System Implementation and Project Management.

1.System Implementation

a. Online applications:

Until 2009, the National Agency could accept only hard-copy application forms from the applicants and then had to transfer all information in the forms to related Commission databases via different software systems manually. Taking into consideration the fact that an average of 4 800 applications is received yearly, this process required an excessive amount of time and effort from the staff. So, transformation of the application process into an electronic system had become an urgent need for both the organization and the applicants.

Since there was a total of 30 different forms and each form contains an average of at least 25 pages; the online filling was quite an unfavorable alternative as filling in one single form in one session was almost impossible either because of the time it required or the technological availability of the applicants. TRNASP was designed in such way; the applicants can connect to the online system, create an account, sign into the system and download the necessary e-forms that are specially prepared for offline form filling operation. For filling the forms, the only necessary tool is Adobe Reader 9.0 which can be downloaded from the internet free of charge. The most important benefit of this offline technology for the applicants is that now they could fill in the application forms in multiple sessions, without the pressure of losing the internet connection or any unsaved work, as there is no longer any need for an internet connection at this phase. Upon completion, the forms can be uploaded to the system easily. Then the forms are sent to queue for validation, where the controls explained in "Technology Solution" part are executed.Â Once validated, a form is directly recorded to the system's database, and an automatic e-mail message is sent to the applicants informing them about the success or failure of their submission.

Since the applicants are able to re-send their forms until the submission deadline and all versions of the forms are needed to be stored according to legal regulations, a hashing algorithm is used for enabling the applicants to send the different versions of the same form for multiple times.

b. Evaluation Process

Upon the completion of the application period, all valid applications are scheduled for eligibility check. After the eligibility check, each successful application is evaluated by two external experts using the TRNASP online evaluation module. During the evaluation period if the difference between the scores of external experts is greater than a defined limit, the consolidation process is executed within the pre-set algorithm procedure. After contraction, payment forms are created for each applicant under specific calculations. During the project lifecycle ,the initial, intermediate and final payments are prepared by system. All budget values are saved to the database and the monitoring of all project budgets are executed within the system.

c. Data Transfer to EC Software Systems

As declared by the European Commission, all national agencies have to use a single standard software (LLPLink).Therefore all application data are transferred from TRNASP knowledge database into the LLPLink system by using SQL Loader tool. During the remaining part of project life cycle, data transfers from LLPLink to TRNASP are made at defined intervals by using certain tools. Past project data located on different information platforms has also been transferred to the central knowledge database after a hard and long process. Hence, various reports and statistics can now be taken from this knowledge-base using a decision support system called Business Objects.

Project Management

We followed a special management model which has a socio-technical and business oriented perspective the details of which are given in the section Lessons Learnt.

Technology solution

TRNASP is developed by using J2EE technology. The project carries various requirements such as security, web-based development, database access, extensibility and flexibility. In order to satisfy these needs, robust tools with interoperable components were chosen for the development phase.

TRNASP consists of various components that can be grouped in two main functions: Application submissions and project lifecycle management. Application submissions in TRNASP are built on Message Oriented Middleware (MoM) architecture, where different modules communicate with each other only asynchronously and the data flows through the message delivery infrastructure between the modules that work consecutively. A "message", the unit communication component is a data structure that has a source, one or more destinations and a payload.

There are two message delivery methods used in the context of TRNASP: Peer-to-peer (PTP) and publish-subscribe (Pub/Sub). PTP enables the delivery of the guaranteed and transaction-based messages between two modules, while Pub/Sub enables the delivery of the same message to one or more modules efficiently. In TRNASP, data flow is sustained through PTP and case notifications are executed via Pub/Sub. Thus, message delivery approach enables the workload to be spread to multiple servers or to multiple destinations on a single server and allows system to be scaled almost linearly. This also provides automatic fail-over functionality.

The application forms used in TRNASP are designed in Adobe Acrobat Professional, in Portable Document Format (PDF). For displaying, filling in and sending their applications, users are able to obtain a copy of Adobe Reader software from the web free of charge. Internet connection for users must be provided only when downloading and uploading the forms. The forms are used to apply certain business rules in TRNASP as "controls" that can be grouped under various titles, such as: Mandatory fields, Schema control (XSD control),Start/End date interval controls, Restrictions on number of max/min choices in checklists, Restriction on number of characters for free text fields, Read-only/inactivated fields, Country/Region/City matching controls, Format controls (i.e. Phone number field should be numeric, email address line should contain "@" and end with a domain suffix, citizen ID numbers should match the corresponding number in Central Civic Software System, etc),Automatic budget calculation

The forms that successfully pass the controls are transformed into a proper PTP message that will be available to be processed by other modules. Digital archiving of these forms is provided with maximum support for logging, searching, reporting and generating statistics easily and efficiently by using relational database structures. All transactions in the system are recorded in a transaction table and all logs are created by referring to these records. Logging mechanism is executed by using Apache Log4j framework and therefore logging in all supported formats can be executed easily i.e. database, file system, Syslog and etc Â For displaying the forms in HTML, Extended Stylesheet Language Transform (XSLT) and "Transforming XML with XSLT" technologies provided by Java platform. For multi-language support in Adobe forms, XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) technology is used providing an XML based Translation/Localization option.

In the project lifecycle management, various technologies are used in three main layers. In Presentation Layer, ExtJS library that supports the execution of asynchronous server-client data transfer via Ajax easily is used, built upon JSP-Servlet logic. The Business Layer uses Spring that works according to the Factory Design Pattern logic and is easily adaptable to third party software. The "bean" classes are maintained in runtime via "inversion of control", and the system works upon interfaces hiding the implementation classes. For Data Access Layer, Hybernate is selected since it provides an easy-to-use management for numerous CRUD transactions and complex report queries.

From the software development perspective, "The quality of a system is highly influenced by the quality of the process used to acquire, develop, and maintain it". Cybersoft, the leading Turkish ICT company that has developed TRNASP, holds CMMI Level 3, as well as ISO 9001:2008 and ISO 27001 certifications. Company's organizational procedures applied throughout the TRNASP project were in full compliance with the process improvement and capability determination models ISO 15504 (SPICE) and Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). ISO/IEC 15504, which is an international standard based on process lifecycle standard ISO 12207, provides an overall determination of the organization's capabilities for delivering products. Similarly CMMI, developed by SEI, can be used to guide process improvement across a project, a division, or an entire organization.

To cope with the tight project schedule, TRANSP was planned, tracked and controlled according to the established standards; monthly project reports and meetings were prepared including the risk mitigation activities. Automated processes such as issue management and test reporting were in place to increase communication and coordination between stakeholders. Continuous customer involvement through joint project/work product reviews and tests was seen as the key to success of the project.

Information security standards, established to protect information assets and give confidence to any interested parties, are followed strictly according due to ISO 27001 ISMS (Information Security Management System) as the project involved sensitive data.TRNASP is being audited by internal auditors of Turkish National Agency, according to COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technologies) standards

Impact, innovation and results

Impact

To give an overview of how TRNASP can play a crucial role in the EU programmes and Turkey's education and youth sector, let us figure out the potential scope of TRNASP. The statistics for the period between 2004-2008 indicate that over 92 000 beneficiaries have benefited from the EU Education and Youth programmes with a budget around 178 million Euro in Turkey. We foresee that the number of beneficiaries will hit 156 000 with a budget around 328 million Euro by the year 2013. According to the 2007 statistics, Turkey was the 7^th country among 31 according to the European Commission budget allocations to the National Agencies. All these numbers indicate the potential impact of TRNASP.

Full automation of a manual process, especially when it includes multiple phases and covers a large user group, is not a simple task. Finding the technological solutions is often not enough unless it is applicable to the real-life business process. Therefore, a consistent transition activity had been executed during the implementation of TRNASP.

To give a better view of the project, we can state that the total number of applications submitted by beneficiaries in the past 5 years is approximately 21 000 and a total of 6 000 out of this amount is approved and financed by Turkish National Agency. Since these numbers are distributed amongst a total of 10 programmes and 33 sub-programmes grouped under 2 main programmes, it can be clearly stated that the transition to any software system would be a complicated and long process. Accordingly, management and process monitoring of these projects bring a very difficult operational workload to Agency's staff.

In addition, Turkey is a highly populated country with over 70 million citizens covering the 1/8 of Europe's population. With very limited human resources of the National Agency and a hugeÂ number of applications and applicants (with the potential users taken into account, the total number of beneficiaries cover the 80% of the country's total population) compared to the other National Agencies around the Europe,Â it is a heavy burden to deal with. Also the time period that these operations have to be completed in is also very limited, increasing the possibility of mistakes during the process.

With the full automation of the project lifecycle management, the time needed to process a single application from the submission phase to the finalization of the project is reduced significantly, by more than 50%. Also, the outsource services acquired for different phases of the project lifecycle are no longer needed as the majority of the work carried out by these services are now executed by TRNASP. Additionally, the National Agency experts are now able to concentrate much more on their own area of profession, rather than dealing with a huge paperwork and other labor-intensive operations which lead to a much efficient use of resources within the organization. Also a yearly average of 200 meeting and training applications are also monitored and managed via a similar approach within TRANSP.

Automation benefits are also experienced in the post-evaluation phases, as the data collected and stored with different methods are now gathered under a single system. This allows the National Agency to keep the track of all project data, sort them by numerous filters, access the required data in seconds, and use the results in a more efficient way than ever. With having such a complete software system for all programmes, the reports submitted to the European Commission are also produced almost instantly upon request.

The output of decision support system integrated within the TRNASP, has been used in decision making especially in the strategic planning work of the organization. This strategic plan of the organization directly affects the education and youth sectors in the country.

As was mentioned previously, the Turkish population is relatively young with 25.5% falling within the 0-15 age bracket. TRNASP's knowledge-based strategies will facilitate reaching most of the population and lead them to create more innovative projects that will create a significant impact both in Turkey's information society strategy and EU's education and youth policies.Â

Creating a knowledge-base of EU Education and Youth Programs also contributes to the dissemination and exploitation of the best practices which is one of the core goals of the programs which are intended to be fully met in the long run by TRNASP, as follows:

1. The NA shall develop a consistent policy in view of an effective dissemination and exploitation of results of activities supported under the de-centralised actions of the programme.

2. The NA shall undertake to identify the potential target audiences in the country and their respective needs.

3. The NA shall put in place a mechanism to identify activities particularly worth being disseminated and exploited, focusing on the evaluation of quality and transfer potential of supported activities.

4. The NA shall systematically gather results from activities undertaken with programme support and make them available to potential users.

5. The NA shall provide the Commission with the requested data on the results of supported activities in the required format.

6. Maximise the exploitation of results of supported activities and thus the impact of the programme at national level, the NA shall develop networks and/or use existing networks of stakeholder bodies and organisations which may play an active role in multiplying and transferring the results achieved by programme beneficiaries.

Track record of sharing

Since application forms are long to fill at once, the best way was to design them as offline forms. Only one program is enough to fill them and it can be obtained from internet freely. Offline forms can be downloaded and uploaded to TRNASP system easily. The process is so simple and quick. There is no need to be a specialist. While downloading, forms can be saved to local disc and filled anytime and anywhere without any need to internet connection. After completion they can be uploaded simply. Furthermore with multilingual support of the system, forms can be translated to any language. This means that a form in English can be changed into a form in German with a single click. Offline forms have also various validations (mandatory fields, date format etc), the upload mechanism puts them under a control procedure in a queue. To our knowledge, we are the first in the public sector that utilize offline forms in Turkey. TRNASP is the best example on such an application procedure. This year approximately 5 713 applications have been taken by TRNASP offline application system. This system can be shared with other national agencies in EU.

Online external expert evaluation system is another innovation of TRNASP. External experts can make quality assessment of the projects easily and quickly by connecting the system .Contracts and payments with all beneficiaries and external experts are carried out in TRNASP. All type of budget and payments can be observed in a detailed fashion. These modules can be also shared with EU Commission for other national agencies.

While the system is in progress, a helpdesk mechanism has been built for all questions about the system.

To conclude, TRNASP, as an integrated system, is a good practice for EU Education and Youth Project applications, assessments and management of the project lifecycle by covering the all phases of execution of EU Education and Youth Programmes from beginning to end

Lessons learnt

Socio-technical and Business Oriented Project Management

It is a well known fact that e-transformation is not only a technical transformation, but a socio-technical transformation including social and organizational aspects. By considering this, we followed a special project management approach where all the staff (both project members and the other workers in the organization)Â included. In other words this is a kind of project governance model where decision making is processed at all levels of organization and the final ideas are a result of various brainstorming meetings. There are two committees within the model , technical committee and managerial committee. While technical issues of the project are maintained by the technical committee, the social and organizational parts are maintained by various working groups under the managerial committee. Two committees are strongly related to each other and perform a two-way communication at different steps of the project lifecycle. By this way, we observe that the TRNASP much more matches up with the business goals and mostly break the user resistance.

The adaptation of this governance framework led us to a new management perspective within the organization which we can also use it on similar work.

Integration with 3^rd Party Programs

Throughout the project, the most difficult issue hard to manage was the integration of the project to other projects that have not completed their software development lifecycles. For example TRNASP had to communicate with LLPLink which is the default program of European Commission each national agency has to use in order to make the project data replicated to the other national agencies in the EU Education and Youth Programmes. However as the LLPLink still goes on its software development lifecycle and continuously publishes new updates, we had difficulties to catch up those developments in time and had adaptation problems. We can say that this is one of the important lessons that we have learnt throughout this project, which briefly showed us that integration management plans are very important especially if the integration target is not stable and a very detailed communication plan is needed with the developers and managers of the other project that you are anticipating to integrate your software.

Security Awareness

As ISO 27001 standards are followed up in TRNASP, we have learned that there are various points that are needed to be protected from software security to network security. However we have also seen that the weakest link in the chain is human being. Therefore security awareness among the staff is a crucial issue. We have also learned that security is not an issue of buying expensive security tools. Rather it is a management issue. Security management should be performed in a systematic approach and should be continuous.

The Importance of Data Input Validation

As was mentioned previously, we have created a central knowledge database and tried to transfer data into that database from various resources. One of those resources was the database of a previous programs used to maintain project data. While we are trying to transfer them to the knowledge database, we have confronted lots of conflicts and faulty data. This has mostly originated from the data input that has not been validated correctly previously, which reveals the point that data input validation should definitely be taken into consideration in software development phase.

Management Support

As it has been the case with similar projects, we have also faced some difficulties and crisis throughout the project. Thanks to continuous and positive support of the management, we managed to overcome all those difficulties. We have also seen that if the support of the management has not been provided, the risk of project failure will become very high.

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