The main modules of the G+ suite include:
- Strategic controlling (Balanced Score Card)
- Funds Management Cash budget planning
- Appraisal Management
- Accountability
- Participative Governance
- Controlling and reporting
Furthermore, there are modules to complete the functionality of the entire solution, such as:
- Extended Governance Vortal: Offers tools for implementation and management of Governance-related thematic portals (vertical portals = vortals).
- Business Process Management (BPM) for process orchestration.
- Knowledge Management for content and information management.
- Stakeholder Relationship Management.
- Basis module for management of the system infrastructure.
The G+ suite offers functionality that covers the following areas:
- Yearly and multiyear planning (data from strategic planning documents, cash budgeting and operations planning);
- Participative Balance sheets (individual and extended);
- Activity price determination from personnel and other cost;
- Management of statistical key figures regarding both the operational area of the Administration and other stakeholders in the environmental, economical and social fields of the territory;
- Strategic controlling and Balanced Scorecards with results measurement based on KPIs;
- Consolidation of both quantitative and qualitative values (budget and/or actual) related to information which is external to the administration(s) of the territory;
- Monitoring of the transfer chain between other public administrations that are stakeholders and the specific administration;
- Internal Reporting: operational and management reporting, as well as institutional;
- Social Accountability (individual and extended);
- External and internal Stakeholder Relationship Management, with the help of integrated tools for planning, management, monitoring and accounting;
- Knowledge Management of internal and external stakeholders regarding all areas of Governance.
The G+ suite modules are highly integrated among each other and have been designed to run also stand-alone and, above all, to be integrated in the application environment at the client’s site.
The technological framework
The underlying technology used for G+ development is based on OFBiz, an open source project of the Apache community (http://ofbiz.apache.org). OFBiz may be considered at the same time a development framework as well as an enterprise application suite that has been created using its own architecture. The opportunity to reuse existing components has been seized in order to accelerate development.
OFBiz tools and architecture enable easy development and efficient enterprise-wide management of the application. This allows timely release of new functionality and less effort has to be put into maintenance of existing software.
The architecture is a web-based 3-tier, divided into components (or modules) each of which with its own entities, graphical interface, business logic and web service definition (SOAP).
The business logic is created as “services”, i.e. reusable pieces of code that can be written in various languages, e.g. Java, Bean Shell or OFBiz minilanguage.
Data access, or persistence, is managed by the OFBiz engine; the OFBiz engine entity manages also change releases: if anything is missing during start-up of the application, tables and columns are added or removed automatically from the DB.