There is an urgent and immediate need for Nepal to define data standards, interoperability frameworks on whose foundation services, products, and marketplaces for Citizens, Businesses, and Government consumers can seamlessly interact.
Open and Agile Smart Cities (OASC) and the MIMs paradigm is a good place to start exploring and defining standards which could address Nepal’s data and service interoperability requirements with a ‘what the future could be’ approach. However, many technical details would need a strong rewrite, customization, future proofing, and design flexibility to accommodate non-native systems, frontier technologies, and a wide spectrum of end user requirements.
Nepal is not a small country. It consists of 7 Provinces, 77 Districts, 753 Municipalities, and 6743 Wards. There are 21 Federal Ministries and each Province Government has some combination of these ministries. There are multiple independent units, e.g. NTA, etc. and Departments. There are 87,753 (2018 CE) civil servants. Each ministry has multiple databases, processes, rules, regulations, and service delivery requirements. A single platform which will facilitate complete integration and seamless communication would be aspirational at this stage.
Rather it is incumbent to incrementally build towards a system which has high fidelity or alignment to design fundamentals and is architecturally defined while it remains vendor agnostic.
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