In many countries, governments have been developing electronic information systems to support in labour market in form of on-line services, web-based application as well as one-stop service. One of the biggest challenges is to facilitate the seamless exchange of labour market information (LMI) across governmental departments. This chapter introduces an efficient implementation of Thailand’s e-government interoperability project in LMI systems using service oriented architecture (SOA) based on XML web service technology. In Thailand, the Ministry of Labour (MOL) has developed a Ministry of Labour Operation Center (MLOC) as the center for gathering, analyzing and monitoring LMI to assist the policy makers. The MOL consists of four departments: department of employment, department of labour protection and welfare, department of skill development, and social security office. Thsse departments utilize electronic systems to manage LMI such as employment, labour protection and welfare, skill development and social security. Provincially, MOL has 75 branches called “labour provincial offices” located at 75 provinces in Thailand. Each office has developed a “Provincial Labour Operation Center or PLOC” as the operating center in the province where the information system called “PLOC” system has been developed to analyze and monitor the localized labour information for the provincial policy-makers. Since these systems differ, it requires the process of data harmonization, modeling and standardizations using UN/CEFACT CCTS and XML NDR for achieving the common XML schema standard, with the implementation of SOA to integrate efficiently all those systems. We apply TH e-GIF guidelines for interoperable data exchanges and the XML schema standardization. In Thailand, the first Thailand e-Government Interoperability Framework – the TH e-GIF - came into being in November 2006. This chapter illustrates main concepts of TH e-GIF, the project background and methodology as well as key leverage factors for the project.
Factors Limiting and Affecting the Use of Market Information Systems in Sahelian Countries