Managing authorization in government management systems: the experience of SIARE-Artefactos

Abstract

Public administration software systems are increasingly adopting microservices architectures to achieve scalability, flexibility, and resilience. However, the complexity of distributed systems poses challenges to access authorization management. This study presents the SIARE-Artefactos solution, which is designed to automate the registration and authorization of resources within Paraguay’s Integrated State Resource Management System (SIARE). SIARE-Artefactos leverages OAuth 2.0 and Spring Boot Starter to ensure secure and efficient authorization processes. SIARE-Artefactos leverages OAuth 2.0 and Spring Boot Starter to ensure secure and efficient authorization processes.  SIARE-Artefactos has been implemented and used by public employees in Paraguay, enabling validation with real users. For the validation we adopted a mixed-methods, combining quantitative with qualitative sources, and a longitudinal observational design. The convergence of evidence allowed us to correlate the objective reduction in deployment times (from minutes to seconds) with the subjective perception of 'system predictability' reported by the DevOps team. Validation of the proposal demonstrates the solution's replicability to other cases with similar challenges and resources, as well as its ability to significantly improve system reliability and reduce configuration time by 74%. This highlights its potential to transform large-scale public administration systems using modern DevOps practices and agile methodologies.