Abstract
    Though with the rapid development of economic globalization and informationization , Chinese e-government development is still in its infancy with a long way ahead .Based on some resent research on today’s e-government in Guangdong, we propose a special model to describe business process in e-government affair operations. The model extends Finite State Machine Model by message passing, business logic and several kinds of constraint check. Using this model to represent governmental business process helps to capture the exact status of each process step, standardize service procedure, describe complex constraint in the process and bring flexibility into its customization, which eventually results in more efficient delivery of services and facilitates greater transparency in the administration of government. Furthermore, it offers new thoughts in representing business process.
1.Introduction
     As we know, China is a big country with a large population , the creation of e-Government is naturally important ,even critical to development of China .An e-government project called “government online project” had begun in China for years age ,and now we have all the provinces and all the state bureaus online.
A number of e-Government services are already on the Internet .Beside the “government online project” ,we also have “corporation online project” and “family online project” as well .Citizens are encouraged to access e-Government service as their convenience . Whenever you link to the www.gov.cn,you may find all the online bureaus ready to service.
     With the rapid development of economic globalization and informationization , China becomes to pay more and more attention to the construction of e-government. Nowadays network infrastructures of every governmental functional ministry have taken shapes and local area network has been finished[4]. Though great efforts has been made, Chinese e-government development is still in its infancy with a
long way ahead. Recently, we made a survey in Guangdong and found that it features the following:
(1)There are hundreds of business processes in day-today work in all sectors of a government, within which there are thousands of forms (of different categories) available at a time. A staff has to deal with them one by one.
(2)Each procedure of e-government business process typically concentrates on a single (or a few key) form(s), where, from the very beginning (non-existence) till the end of its procedure, additional data are added or updated in each step (e.g. an application form will be the main subject when applying for passport for Hongkong-Macau). To simplify the business process to serve the public, government officers are inclined to put almost full information into a single (or a few key) form(s) in each service functions.
(3)Governmental business processes are characterized by internal-external-oriented, repeatable, rule-complex and alterable. Where internal-oriented states that officers concern more about a specific or final result of a certain business, and the efficiency in their departments as well. External-oriented means they are open to the public, who care much for the current state of a certain service they have initiated previously. Repeatable is known to all and easy to understand. Rule-complex stipulates the complexity in a governmental process like ”if the amount is larger than 5000, two section chiefs are required to involve in the approval, otherwise staff can make decisions alone”. Alterable dictates the fact that adjustments can be made to an existing process according to some law or policy.
    One of the vital parts of developing e-government affair system is the building and representation of its business process. Nowadays, there are several business process modeling methods: Event-driven Process Chains (EPC), Petrinet , Workflow Management Reference Model, and the like .In our practice, we summarize the key features and problems aforementioned and create a corresponding model to describe business process in project design stage, since none of these existing models fully solves these problems. In a nutshell, our model extends Finite State Machine Model together with Message Passing (MP), Business Logic (BL) and several kinds of constraint check. In this paper we name it State-based Process Description Model (SPDM for short).Our practice shows that SPDM fits the requirement well, simplifies the relation between several processes by message interaction, and provides new thoughts in representing business process.
     The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we present SPDM in detail, together with formal definitions. Then we give an illustration in section 3. Section 4 discusses its practice and evaluation and section 5 concludes.
2. Details of SPDM
     In software design stage, we propose using the term form(including application form, bill of document, task specification ,receipt, certificate, etc.) to represent objects in application layer, so that it would be more natural and smoother to describe and discuss governmental business process.
Definition 1 (State). State is a description of the form’s overall property in a certain stage within its lifecycle. In SPDM, every state is identified by a unique name. Formally ,a state is associated with some specific form items ,which reflects essentially what is claimed by its name.
Definition 2 (Process). Considering only one single form, a process is the changing course during its lifecycle, with the ongoing business operations. A process is depicted as a directed graph where nodes denote states and dashed arcs denote transition between states. Every process should have one start state and zero to unlimited final states.
    Under this circumstance, the advancing of a process is that every form starts from its start state denoted startPi ,and reaches one of its final states denoted finalPi through several business operations (in some cases, the process will continue endless without a final state). Note that this is a
rough definition of SPDM’s process, in the following we’ll present it in detail and formally.
    Definition 2 only concentrates on the lifetime of a single form, but what about the relation between two processes?
In our opinion, Message Passing (MP) sounds effective in representing it. Intuitively, if some transition in the process of form1 needs to communicate with form2 (like Fig.1), it simply sends/receives a message (possibly wrapped with data) to/from form2.
3. Practice and Evaluation
   SPDM has debuted successfully as an important part of the supporting platform of our e-government affair system .The project is now under control though hundreds of business processes and operations are involved. Our practice shows that SPDM owns the following advantages:
(1)SPDM possesses strong process descriptive capability owe to the form-basis of process and the introduction of CF and MP. Practically, they contribute to declaratively describing complex restriction in governmental process, decomposing hundreds of seemingly-mixed business processes effectively and ensuring that they move forward in gear, bringing flexibility into the customization of process, and simplifies the relation between several processes.
(2)Processes modeled by SPDM are loosely coupled and independent, so that the modification of one process has little impact on others, which enhances extensibility.
(3)State-based clarifies the current and past status of each service procedure, which enables the transparency of governmental service and changes the way people interact with their government.
4. Future Work
As the “government online project” going on ,we must take some important point into consideration:
First of all , not like constructing an e-commerce project ,the e-government must have a special organization to manage the progress .Because the government must be responsible to what information it have put on the net and to its sequent .So ,as we boost the progress ,we must have a firm control over the whole thing.
Second , we must break the information monopoly and consummate the regulations and laws on internet information .Lack of information will cause chaos but information abuse will have the same result as well.
    Third ,the real government must change its workflow to fit the e-government’s  requirement .Our officials must know how to deal with the daily affair on net .This requires some kind of technical training and management training as well.
5.Conclusion
    In this paper, we introduce a new business process model for e-government affair system, which extends Finite State Machine Model by Message Passing, Business Logic and three constraint checks. Applying SPDM to represent governmental business process helps to meet the needs and features mentioned in section 1, standardize its service procedure and improve current government services, which are the most important factors hindering informationization and e-government in China[3]. Eventually it results in faster, cheaper delivery of services, facilitates greater transparency in the administration of government and accelerates the realization of one stop shopping service.
    SPDM is also referential to many kinds of process modeling in, e.g. Hospital Information System (HIS), Office Automation (OA), etc. Furthermore, it gives new thoughts in representing business process and process interaction .We hope to propose formal definitions to different patterns of process interaction (like Chained, Peer-to-Peer, Parallel Synchronized, etc.) based on SPDM and explain the advancing of business process formally by specifying its operational semantics.