Orchestration of (chain-) processes in subsidy agencies: Developing a generic subsidy orchestration system

The Netherlands houses a great variety of subsidy agencies, each very different in their organizational and operational approach to achieve their goal (the distribution of subsidies). These subsidy agencies share the common problem of being unable to adapt their subsidy system quickly due to a high grade of customization in their information systems. Subsidy processes and supporting systems are tightly coupled and a change in one of them leads to a lot of organizational and operational costs and causes delay which is not desirable. A more adaptive subsidy system is needed to reduce organizational and operational costs and to reduce delay when the system needs to be changed. In this thesis, the concept of Enterprise Ontology has been explored by using generic components to design a generic subsidy system, in order to provide a more adaptive subsidy system, which can be fine-tuned to match the requirements of a variety of governmental organizations. To come to this generic subsidy system the clustering of subsidies as used by subsidy agencies has been analyzed first. Next, the administrative descriptions of five subsidy agencies at different governmental levels have been analyzed with respect to their processes and services. The administrative descriptions also provided an understanding of the actors involved in a subsidy system. Using the analysis results, an abstraction has been made by comparing the process and service models of the five performed case studies to yield a generic process and service model, composed of generic components. Next, the design of the generic subsidy system started with defining the initial conditions followed by the composition of a requirements set which contained requirements to be respected during system design. From this set, a subset of feasible requirements has been selected, since the initial set turned out to be far too large to satisfy in this research. Next, the generic subsidy system has been designed by means of an ontological model (fully independent from its implementation) and an implementation model (containing all the details for implementing the generic subsidy system). To evaluate the design of the generic subsidy system, a prototype has been used to conclude whether the generic subsidy system indeed provided a more adaptive system and to find out potential side effects of implementing a specific subsidy system by using the generic subsidy system as its reference. Concluding this thesis, the evaluation of the generic subsidy system illustrated that a more adaptive subsidy system can be realized using generic components, since: · A subsidy system using a centralized orchestrating process and decentralized process components allows the subsidy process and/or its supporting components to be changed without harming each other; · Changing a subsidy process no longer introduces delay in transitioning from the current version to the next version of the process, since the generic subsidy system and orchestration technology allow various versions of a process to coexist. As a side-effect of implementing a specific subsidy system, overhead in a subsidy system can be reduced as well. Taking the generic subsidy system as a baseline for implementing the specific subsidy system, redundant elements can be left out and only the essential elements are implemented in the specific subsidy system. Implementing the generic subsidy system could have negative side effects when adaptivity alone is not enough and is enforced. These negative side effects however, are not researched in this thesis.

Subject

DEMO
subsidy
subsidy reference model

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master thesis

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