The Essay Discusses E-voting And EIA RA, Providing Valuable Insights.

You are to prepare a preliminary report for the Australian Federal Government describing the benefits of an Enterprise Information Architecture Reference Architecture (EIA RA) for developing a national eVoting system. Attention should be made to an information centric design and how to best achieve this.The intended audience for this report are government officials who may have knowledge of the electoral system but limited computing knowledge.
Your report should follow the following template:
Executive Summary
Table of Contents
Table of Figures
Table of Tables

Discuss the benefits an EIA RA approach can provide to guide development of an eVoting system. This discussion should expand on at least three of the identified benefits and should include at least one diagram providing an overview of the proposed system.The disparate nature of entities and systems within government, the volume of structured and unstructured data, and the sensitivity of that data pose challenges for data management and integration.You are to describe several of these challenges and propose strategies to overcome them.

Introduction to E-voting system

E-voting is defined as an electronic voting system that uses different types of practices and technologies to record and count the total numbers of votes. In such kind of process, the assistance of electronic technologies involves collecting the data or information of any person and store in an electronic manner. In this modern era, the use of e-voting system has increased by 40% and most countries use this technique during the federal election (Alathur, Ilavarasan, and Gupta, 2016). The purpose of this report is to describe the concept of the e-voting system and the role of enterprise information architecture reference architecture in e-voting with their benefits.

A recent study shows that Australian federal government increased the efficiency of the voting process by 40% because they developed a new approach (E-voting) which record the data of every person and stored into more advanced computer devices (Bouras, Katris and Triantafillou, 2003). To improve the performance and effectiveness of federal election information technology developed a new technique that is EIA RA that will be analysis in this report. Mainly, this report is divided into the main two parts, for example, enterprise information architecture reference architecture and information management and integration.

2.0 Enterprise information architecture reference architecture 

Term EIA is defined as part of enterprise architecture which is used to provide a common outline for the cost-effective approach to share data across the various organizations. It is one of the best approaches that have the potential to develop a more effective e-voting system and Australian government can adopt this technique in order to improve the security of individual votes (Cortier, 2015). It is observed that this technology is used by many government authorities to reduce assessment, design and implement of the common business language and process redundancy assessment. There are main three sub-architectures of EIA process which are the following:

• Technical architecture
• Organization architecture
• Business architecture

Business architecture provides an integrated opinion of the data from a business-oriented perspective. Technical architecture provides a way to outlook the current technical environment and migration strategy to bring the desired technical environment. Organization architecture deals with the high-level structure of an organization and processes completed by every person.

The recent study identified that enterprise information architecture is a kind of process that evaluates the current state, future stage, and exchange information to achieve more effective enterprise change (Geerts, and McCarthy, 2008). It is a map of the information concept that can be used for development of e-voting system and Australian government can adopt this technique during generation of electronic voting for the election. Mainly, this technique is used to identify what these information con concepts involve, how they are designed and implemented within an information technology system and how they are connected to each other. The architecture of an enterprise system is divided into main four parts, for example, conceptual, logical, physical, and governance.

Enterprise Information Architecture Reference Architecture (EIA RA)

In the section of conceptual, the data's or information's are collected and a conceptual entity is produced to store the structured data. In the section of logical, the information entity map to the applications and repositories and physical data of consumers is understand by using analytical and operational approaches. At the end of enterprise architecture, the Australian government will develop their strategies and policies to control and monitor the process of the electronic voting machine.

The enterprise information system represents a systematic approach that defines the environmental consequences of the development action. There are numerous steps involves in this technique which are described below:

Project screening: this stage involves the submission of an enterprise system to those schemes which may have important environmental impacts. However, the project screening process is completed with the help of EIA regulation.

Scoping: this stage identifies the key factors, important environmental issues that affect the project and available alternatives.

Consideration of alternatives: this step ensures that the advocate has measured other feasible methods, counting another project places, scales, procedures, plans, working condition and the no-action option.

Description of the project action: this kind of stage involves in EIA to clarify the purpose and rationale of the project and understand their characteristics like location, steps of development and processes.

Identification of key impacts: this is a very important step in an enterprise information system that identifies the environmental impacts like beneficial and adverse.

Benefits of enterprise information architecture

Enterprise information architecture is an advanced technology which is used to analyse and store the data or information of consumers and many companies are using this step to improve the security of their data. Recently Australian government included this technique in the area of the federal election to analysis and store the numbers of votes during an election.

There are numerous advantages to this technology which will be discussed in this chapter. Initially, these process facilities the common understanding needed among the business lines by using models which are produced from an enterprise system (Germann, and Serdült, 2017). By using the corporate data framework, this approach provides a platform for the evaluation of the existing data structure and maintains the integrated set of the data structure. Another most important advantage of this technique is the simple integration of new business data to existing procedure setting with statistics plotted to the Australian government model as compare to databases.  It also provides a quick orientation process for the new resources to improve the security of the electronic voting system.  

Benefits of Enterprise Information Architecture

Operational advantages 

A recent study investigated that enterprise information architecture is a high-level architecture system which is a more effective approach to manage the information of consumers. It has the potential to reduce redundant efforts, operation and processes that increase a company’s performance. With the help of this process the efficiency of the federal system in Australia can be increased (Zada, Falzon, and Kwan, 2016).

Managerial benefits 

It is observed that the enterprise system has the capability to manage and control the complexity of information technology and provide a suitable process to handle the business operations. It also improves the risk and change management process and risk assessment is one of the complex tasks for every enterprise system. With the help of this method government authority can map portfolio, mapping and optimization capabilities (Germann, and Serdült, 2017).

Strategic benefits 

According to an expert of enterprise system the EIA RA approach also increased the quality of data and in the field of electronic voting, this technique improves the overall efficiency of the voting process. There are many other advantages of this technology which are described below:

• Increased project success and company goal achievement
• Also, provide guidance
• Increased information technology alignment and options
• Also increased the long-term investments
• Provide consumer satisfaction process (Giachetti, 2016).

3.0 Information Management and Integration

Data management and integration both are the main key factors for the development of electronic voting because e-voting contains a large amount of consumer’s data which is managed by data management process. The aim of the data integration process is to cartel dissimilar sets of data into expressive information (Niu, Da Xu, and Bi, 2013). There are various challenged faced by these approaches in the area of electronic voting which are described below:

A quick and accurate understanding of data

The Australian government developed the electronic voting process to improve the efficiency of the federal election but they are facing the issue of quick response. Due to which the experts of the EIA system are not able to understand the data sources (Pang, et al., 2015). Such kind of problem occurs when a large amount of individual’s data collects from different resources and e-voting process collects both structured and unstructured data. The Australian government can adopt the advanced information technology to analyse the human data and improve the performance of data integration approach.

Handling changes in data over time

This is one of the common problems faced by data integration approach in electronic voting because various resources are updated at various intervals. It is observed that sources can have very unusual processes for controlling updates which can cause supposition in databases (Weerakkody, and Choudrie, 2009). It is very difficult to combine the data collected from various resources due to which the e-voting machine faced the issue of data handling (Reiners, 2017). Most the countries are using big data technology during the election because it has potential to analysis the huge amount of data and information. The data from multiple resources are completely based on the contexts and consistency due to which the issue of handling changes occur.

Operational Advantages

Data mapping 

Data mapping is a very common challenge faced by data management and data integration process because the electronic voting method contains both unstructured and structured data due to which the issue of data mapping occurred. To map data with stored data the electronic voting uses business analysis, technical knowledge and domain expertise steps (Rouhani, et al., 2015). 

Security and privacy issues

Security of data is a very crucial situation of every organization because the use of information technology is growing rapidly due to which various kinds of security threats and risks are also increased. The electronic voting system uses internet connectivity and computer networks and hackers develop a huge amount of traffic that transfer on the network of e-voting due to which government can lose human data (Soomro, Shah, and Ahmed, 2016). Data breaching, hacking, cyber-attacks, DDOS attack and malware all these are security issues occurred in the data integration of electronic voting.

Strategies to overcome challenges 

Information technology developed many security policies or strategies to improve the performance of the information management and integration which are described below:

• The Australian federal government can adopt security programmes to control data integration issues
• At the time of the election, they can perform their electronic systems and check their availability
• The excerpts of EIA RA should ensure that all security tools are working and any problem occurs in the computer system then take action immediately.
• Update software on regular basis (Xu, 2011).
• Use big data and cloud computing to analysis and control both unstructured and structured data
• The government should design and implement the security plans to handle the issue of cyber-crimes
• If any unwanted signal or unauthentic networks observed in their servers than use firewall or antivirus to block them
• Australian federal government can adopt the cryptography and encryption technology to improve the security of their data and information management system.
• The issue of data mapping can be resolved by using a big data approach because it has the potential to analysis and maps both unstructured and structured data
• Use the printer machine along with the e-voting system
• Conduct more extensive pre-election voting machine test which avoids the future issues faced by the Australian government

4.0 Conclusion 

This report is completely based on the electronic voting system and with the help of this research readers can expand their knowledge in the area of a federal election. Electronic voting is one of the advanced technologies for an election that uses electronic systems, computer devices and IT technologies to record, store and maintain consumer data.

It has the potential to improve the security of data and performance of election federal system and Australian federal government can adopt this process to improve the effectiveness of election. This report described the importance of enterprise information architecture with their advantages and challenged faced by data integration and information management. The Australian federal government should ensure that they follow the concept of enterprise information architecture and handle consumer’s data in a more effective manner.  

5.0 Recommendation 

It is recommended that the issue of security is increasing due to use of unauthentic servers and networks which can be handled by using advanced security plans like firewall, antivirus, cryptography and encryption technology. The Australian government should adopt develop security strategies or policies to improve the performance of the electronic voting system and use advanced information technology to improve data mapping steps. The sensitivity of the data can be increased by using big data and cloud computing technologies and analysis of both unstructured and structured data can be done by using a big data approach.

References

Alathur, S., Ilavarasan, P.V. and Gupta, M.P., (2016) Determinants of e-participation in the citizens and the government initiatives: Insights from India. Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 55(1), pp.25-35.

Bouras, C., Katris, N. and Triantafillou, V., (2003) An electronic voting service to support decision-making in local government. Telematics and Informatics, 20(3), pp.255-274.

Cortier, V., (2015) Formal verification of e-voting: solutions and challenges. ACM SIGLOG News, 2(1), pp.25-34.

Geerts, G.L. and McCarthy, W.E., (2008) An ontological analysis of the economic primitives of the extended-REA enterprise information architecture. International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, 3(1), pp.1-16.

Germann, M. and Serdült, U., (2017) Internet voting and turnout: Evidence from Switzerland. Electoral Studies, 47(2), pp.1-12.

Giachetti, R.E., (2016) Design of enterprise systems: Theory, architecture, and methods. CRC Press.

Niu, N., Da Xu, L. and Bi, Z., (2013) Enterprise information systems architecture—Analysis and evaluation. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 9(4), pp.2147-2154.

Pang, Z., Chen, Q., Han, W. and Zheng, L., (2015) Value-centric design of the internet-of-things solution for food supply chain: Value creation, sensor portfolio and information fusion. Information Systems Frontiers, 17(2), pp.289-319.

Reiners, M., (2017) Electronic Voting in Comparative Perspective: Status Quo in Estonia and Trends in Central Europe. Journal of Comparative Politics, 10(1), p.40.

Rouhani, B.D., Mahrin, M.N.R., Nikpay, F., Ahmad, R.B. and Nikfard, P., (2015) A systematic literature review on Enterprise Architecture Implementation Methodologies. Information and Software Technology, 62(1), pp.1-20.

Soomro, Z.A., Shah, M.H. and Ahmed, J., (2016) Information security management needs a more holistic approach: A literature review. International Journal of Information Management, 36(2), pp.215-225.

Weerakkody, V. and Choudrie, J., (2009) Exploring e-government in the UK: Challenges, issues and complexities. Journal of Information Science & Technology, 2(2), pp. 12-16.

Xu, L.D., (2011) Information architecture for supply chain quality management. International Journal of Production Research, 49(1), pp.183-198.

Zada, P., Falzon, G. and Kwan, P., (2016) Perceptions of the Australian public towards mobile internet e-voting: risks, choice and trust. Electronic Journal of e-Government, 14(1), pp.117-34.