Here below is a list of titles of ongoing projects by students at the IT University.

Most of the students are always interested in speaking with experts and practitioners in their areas, so if you are such and want to speak to students, let me know. If you are looking for a fresh graduate to hire, also let me know.

I can connect you to specific students, but am also happy to arrange (virtual or local) seminars etc with relevant clusters of students. See also my unofficial ITU Enterprise program.

• Portfolio management as a strategic lever
• Architecture Frameworks and Value Creation.
• An organic change mangement project – a systemic approach
• Customer at the center – enterprise architecture in a media house
• Agile Procurement in Government
• BPMN in a public perspective
• Digitilisation in a system theoretic perspective
• EA in Greenland
• EA in a public company
• Evolving Business Process Management (BPM) Strategies in Enterprise Architecture (EA)
• Free and discout CrewManagementIT
• Policy for securing of It architecture, data and Intellectual property
• Preanalysis of the business and design aspects related to developing a smartphone (web) app.
• Project Portfolio Management in a Strategic Perspective
• SAP NetWeaver Business Process Management Security Policies
• Service Oriented Architechture (SOA) for a small business
• Should one of the leading Faroese IT Enterprises have an IT strategy?
• Strategy, Governance, and Enterprise Architecture in Private and Public Organizations
• The single version of the truth
• The value creation of IT-projects of the Capital Healthcare Region with focus emphasis on Enterprise Architechure
• Analysis of Scrum in practice
• Applied Enterprise Architecture in Ørestad Airways
• Business Opportunities with Cloud Services
• Strategisk IT i Koncernservice – EA med forhindringer
• Private EA. versus public EA. – A comparative analysis
• Digitalization in the name of democracy – potential and barriers
• Establishing an effective project management for outsourcing projects
• Producibility an Industry Paradigm: Reforming the Approach to Enterprise Architecture and Systems Integration
• Public procurement of IT
• Systematic Harnessing of Collective Intelligence and Web 2.0 on the Stock Market
• A Case Study of Applied Enterprise Architecture

Many organisations opening up for students require confidentiality agreements (NDAs), which is understandable and no problem administratively.

Around luchtime today, Danish Standards sent out a press announcement. I just found the English version: Danish Standards will change Danish vote:

“On behalf of Denmark, Danish Standards has decided to change the vote on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 OOXML from ‘Disapproval with comments’ to a vote of ‘Approval’.”

It is worth noting that the S142-U34 committee’s final recommendation to Danish Standards does not provide consensus on a change of the original Danish vote. That is made clear in a letter (in Danish) to Danish Standards from the committee chair, professor Mogens Kühn Pedersen.

Speaking of changes … the Danish central administration is facing some major changes.

Yesterday, Computerworld broke the news (Gigantisk it-revolution pÃ¥ vej i staten): The government will establish two centralised, state-wide administrative service centres, one for IT service, and one for HR, travel admin, financial management, etc. Today, the Minister of Taxation came out and presented the IT service centre plan. Estimated savings: 425 million DKK annually, a lot of money compared to the US. Significant staff reductions are planned: In IT, from current 1.576 FTE to 1.132 over three years. The IT-consolidation will reduce today’s 4.000 servers to around 700.

On Tuesday, the Minister of Finance presented the central government budget proposal for 2008, which enforces a 1% spending freeze. Hmm, guess they’ve read Kotter’s eight steps to change management, where step one is to create a sense of urgency for changes.

Michael Karvø and other experts applauds the plan. And so do I. But just as Kim Viborg Andersen, professor at Copenhagen Business School, I do also see some if not many pitfalls and significant risk elements. The central government administration is a darn complex beast, and only rarely acts as one enterprise. On the other hand, over the past several years there has been many attempts at enterprise solutions at the state-wide level, especially with administrative services, so in some areas, these changes are just “natural” next steps towards “the state as an enterprise”.

Been there, done that? Dorte Toft reminds us that it is barely a decade ago since the Danish state had its own, central IT-service centre, the Datacentralen, which was then sold out to CSC. Whether the new plan is in fact a revival of Datacentralen – Datacentralen 2.0? – is quite unclear to me. From what I can read (also I haven’t seen the actual proposal/report) the plan will not necessarily mean more insoucing and “home taking” of tasks and operations. It’s more about re-souring, if you want – moving tasks and operations from individual ministries and agencies to the new service centre.

IMO, it’s a good strategy to go with Area 12 in this process of enterprising the state. “Area 12″ is the call name for the service area called “Administration and Management” in the Government Business Reference Model, FORM, which the Ministry of Finance released late last year. FORM must now be seen as a very essential tool in the implementation of the plan, and I really hope the decision makers will understand that. Basically, they need to understand what is administrative IT and what’s not, and that is exactly what FORM can help with.

It’s official: Denmark has voted No with Comments to ISO/IEC DIS 29500 OOXML. See Danish Standards’ press release (in Danish). They are submitting 64 pages of comments, and state that Denmark will work for an approval assuming the comments will be addressed.

I’ve read through the comments, and find them balanced and thorough. It will require some substantial changes to EOOXML for it to address these comments. However, addressing the comments will also require changes to OpenDocument, because the gist of the comments is to ensure interoperability between the ISO document standards.

Good thing so many companies have recently joined the various standards committees, because if ISO follows the Danish recommendations, lots of work is yet to be done.

A year ago, my former collegue Søren Peter Nielsen wrote, on behalf of the Danish government, a letter to Microsoft. Seems he got a response, and I’m sure it’ll interest XMLGrrl and many others, that an announcement was made yesterday: Agreement between the National IT and Telecom Agency and Microsoft: Agreement concerning partial support of the SAML 2.0 standard.

“The ongoing dialog between the National IT and Telecom Agency and Microsoft has resulted in an agreement on partial support of the SAML 2.0 standard in Microsoft’s forthcoming version of their federation product named Active Directory Federation Services 2″, the agency writes.

The text agreed upon is as follows:

“The Danish public sector has chosen SAML 2.0 as their federation standard. Microsoft products use WS-Federation and WS-Trust as the foundation of their federated identity architecture. The Danish government has agreed that the SAML 2.0 token format is sufficient to provide basic interoperability between WS-Federation and SAML 2.0 environments as a common assertion format, without loss of authentication integrity.

To support interoperability between WS-Federation and SAML 2.0 based products Microsoft has agreed to support the SAML 2.0 token format in the future release of Active Directory Federation Services code-named Active Directory Federation Services “2″. Microsoft will provide the Danish public sector Centre of Service Oriented Infrastructure with pre-release code to help analysis and planning of solutions for integrating WS-Federation-based clients in the Danish federation, and to collect feedback on the feature implementation.

In addition, the co-authors of WS-Federation (including Microsoft) have submitted the specification to OASIS for standardization. This step further enables interoperability between federated environments that deploy SAML 2.0-based products and those that deploy WS-Federation-based products.”

In commenting the agreement, the agency writes: “With this agreement a possibility for inclusion of Microsoft based clients in a common public SAML 2.0 based federation has opened”, and notes:

The integration will require the standard based login solutions to be expanded with a special integration code. The solution is therefore a pragmatic tactical integration solution, but with the above-mentioned partial SAML 2.0 support from Microsoft it is expected that the integration can be done without influencing the individual “Microsoft Active Directory Federation Service” user organizations.

The agency notes that more iinformation on the concrete possibilities will be published as the National IT and Telecom Agency’s Centre for Service Oriented Infrastructure receives pre-release code from Microsoft that can be integration tested.
The agency elaborates a bit more on the deal:

It is still desired, that Microsoft support all of the SAML 2.0 standard in their products, but the above-mentioned agreement are a good first step towards more convergence among standards for transverse user management.

The National IT and Telecom Agency also sees the filing of the WS-Federation (WS-FED) specification for standardization in OASIS as a step that can promote convergence among federation standards.

It should be stressed that it does not mean that the WS-Federation specification is recommended equally to SAML 2.0 for common public solutions.

When the results of the standardization with WS-Federation become available (expectedly in the end of 2008) it might be relevant to do a new assessment but for now the SAML 2.0 it is still the only standard, which is recommended as a federation standard for Danish common public solutions.

So, there we have it.

I want to congratulate Søren Peter on a job well done. Stand firm on SAML 2.0, the open ecosystem needs it. And thanks to Microsoft for listening to customers (but why only partial support?).

I wrote a Danish article in Version2 published yesterday. Here is my translation:

Danish Document Controversy Raises International Concerns

OpenDocument Foudation is very concerned about the development in Denmark. Moreover, the organisation is readying a plugin that will make it even easier to use the ODF-format.

John Gøtze

The awareness of the political initiatives around the usage of open standards reaches beyond Denmark.

“Denmark needs a winning attitude, but this policy is appeasement”, comments Sam Hiser, Director of Business Affairs in OpenDocument Foundation, an organization promoting and supporting ODF.

Sam Hiser is following the international development around ODF closely, and is not pleased with what he hears from Denmark.

“Denmark’s dual format policy is one of the more depressing events in recent months”, he says.

“It sets a precedent for compromise that paints Danish agencies into a corner,” he argues.

Hiser proposes that the Danish policy should above all permit CIOs to do the necessary business process re-engineering to get away from the control of tMicrosoft.

“We’ve always thought our conception of an ODF Plugin for MS Office as being among Microsoft’s worst nightmares. And that it is. Something which goes into Windows XP/Office and permits native file open, edits and save as ODF is going to be very interesting”, Hiser tells about the ODF Foundation’s plugin.

There are other ODF-plugins to Microsoft Office. First, Sun’s Plugin for MS Office, which produces an OpenOffice-equivalent conversion to ODF. Second, the Microsoft/Clever Age/Novell Plugin for Office 2007.

The OpenDocument Foundation calls their ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office “da Vinci”, but is not yet an finished product.

Hiser explains that the da Vinci plugin has two elements the others do not. First, it has a ODF InfoSet API for server-side integration with the ODF Plugin for MS Office. Second, it has a ODF Feature-Set Wizard to help organizations govern the features in their office files.

Hiser explains that the OpenDocument Foundation’s plugin will ensure vendor independence when developing applications that use the document data.

Thanks, Sam!

Following up on my recent blog entry, Mandatory Open Standards in Denmark, I want to draw attention to further reports published by the National IT and Telecom Agency as background material to the main report. These materials are all in English.
First is a report called Research about OpenXML, ODF & PDF made for the Danish government by Norwegian consultancy house Ovitas AS.

The criteria covered in the research report include three main areas:
1. Openness (open documentation, rights, open interface, open meeting, consensus, due process)
2. Market issues (penetration, maturity, implementation)
3. Business potentials (functional and non-functional requirements, security, potentials and architecture)
In conclusion, they write:

The conclusion of this preliminary research is that both OpenXML and ODF qualify as viable candidates for open standards for editorial document formats based on the criteria used in this research. PDF is currently controlled by Adobe Systems but has a unique worldwide take up.

“Viable candidates”? Hmmm. Nevertheless, the report is a fairly balanced analysis, which on several accounts makes it very clear, that there are big differences between the standards. One could, reasonably I’d argue, ask how the conclusion is supported by the research. I miss the substantial argument for how low a barrier one should have for what is and what isn’t a viable candidate.

It is worth noting that the hearing report in appendix A (only in Danish) has a quite thorough outline of how standard assessments should be conducted. The Norwegians does note that their work was done in parallel to the development of this outline, so I suppose we can’t blame them. But one would expect more from the Danish administration then. What is missing is exactly the specific “scores” for, or evaluations of, various detailed issues. If we assume such scores are red/yellow/green, my bet is that OOXML would have quite a few yellows if not reds, which would need some explaining in order to make the conclusion valid.

More serious research
The government commissioned a research project about “Open Standards and their Early Adoption” in 2005-06. This was conducted by Professor Mogens Kühn Pedersen and Vladislav V. Fomin from Department of Informatics at Copenhagen Business School, and their final report is also available (download report, literature review and delphi survey). The report’s executive summary:

Standards have proven themselves indispensable to the industrial revolution. How are standards developed today? What does the economics of standards tell about the impact of standards upon economic growth and productivity? Do standards influence industry innovation? How are the standardization processes in the field of ICT taking place? How and why do open standards differ from other types of standards? How may open standards influence ICT government policy and the reverse: How will government need to take action in the face of the international trend toward open standards in ICT?

The reports perhaps raises more questions than they answer. But read them you must.

Quoting myself:

This article discusses current and recent developments in Denmark, where open standards have become a central policy issue. Although Denmark is prone for leading the way in true, large-scale openization, a full-blown effort towards these ends is highly unlikely.

That’s the abstract of an article I wrote for translation into Spanish and publication in Novática, the journal of the Spanish CEPIS society ATI, Asociación de Técnicos de Informática, issue 184 (November-December 2006).

The editor, Llorenç Pagés, is also Chief Editor of Upgrade, The European Journal for the Informatics Professional, and will also there soon publish an issue about ODF, in which I will have an extended version of my article.

Llorenç allowed me to share my English manuscript, so I’ve uploaded it here: You can get the ODF-version or the web-version: A Brief History of Open Standards in Denmark, where the password is ODF

I invite comments on the article. I’m still working on the extended version, and think improvements are possible …
On a side-note, I had to hack WordPress to be able to upload ODF-files within it. Bugger, that should be a standard feature!!

On another side-note, you should be able to use OpenID when leaving your comment.

Amir Hadziahmetovic has published his MSc in IT thesis, which he made under my supervision. It is in English and is called Digital Identity Management – Challenges and Benefits (Download PDF). Besides giving a nice introduction to and analysis of Identity Management, Amir makes some interesting observations about the identity management situation in Denmark. I recommend everyone to read this good thesis.

I’ve extracted a few central paragraphs introducing the project:

The main research problem is how to find the optimal model that will solve Digital Identity (DI) management and the data interchange for electronic business in new network economy. The problem lies in unknown path of how to make choices for interoperable DI, and how to find the optimal strategy to implement chosen model. The research will commence with exploring the area of general Digital Identity Management, continue with analyzing platform for interoperable management and exchange of DIs, including implementation challenges, and end with listing the benefits of having such a platform implemented.

Imagine the sewerage management of a bigger city where each building block has a container for waste waters instead of a city-wide sewerage system. Without drain-pipes connecting the containers, every now and then a container would fill up, and for emptying a pump-trucks would be needed. They would pump out the content from a container, and spill it out at some depot outside the town. This would be very complex system of containers and trucks, difficult to control and manage. Some of the containers would certainly get overfilled, causing flooding and bad smell. With the growth of the city, the system would get even more unreliable. Therefore the majority of today’s cities have outspread sewerage system, which connects the depots, automating the spill of waste waters.

The similar problem modern business has with today’s DI management: Identity data in containers, filling up quickly; the system unable to exchange data with other systems; difficult to maintain and automate the spill of data. To enable development of electronic business, more reliable system for DI management is required.

Business trends today push organizations toward strengthening of cooperation and linking of business processes between them. Many companies and governments are tending to expand their activities by integrating online services and systems, and letting external users access internal data. Individual users want comfortable Web experience, and minimal effort in getting tailor-made products and services. Inability of today’s IT systems to match these trends is choking present development of business. Strengthening of cooperation and linking of business processes is putting pressure on IT systems and belonging infrastructure, requiring that Digital Identity data is created in unified fashion, and safely exchanged between organizations.

Digital Identity Management (IM) is a fundamental part of integrated company systems and online services. It defines who has access to what in some cases, and identifies customers and users of the services in other cases. IM architecture of today has to evolve from predominantly silo to common, interoperable architecture, based on open standards. This kind of architecture is a fundament for Federated IM, where identities are safely exchanged.

This project will try to look at Digital Identity Management, technology and architecture in relation to business goals and strategies. The main concepts of Digital Identity Management will be addressed i.a. concepts like Federated Identity, Single Sign-On (SSO), and Open Standards. The report will present a study of business and technical implications of Federating Identity, where Identity management is the central issue.

An analysis of the practical as well as architectural aspects of Federated Identity will be covered. An analysis of open standards for interoperability will be covered, especially those advised by Danish National IT and Telecom Agency and their Reference Model for Identity. The report will focus on standards from the Model such as Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and Public certificates for electronic services – OCES Digital Signature, but also will discuss alternatives. Finally privacy issues will be considered.

The fundamental objective of any enterprise IT system must be full support to business flexibility and agility in ever-changing business environment. The ultimate goal of this project is to perceive the challenges of the IM evolution path, and to show how Identity Management supports connection between the systems and the processes, providing users with better web experience.

Method: The project will list general theoretical issues, comparing different views on these issues, and presenting own reasoning.

The obstacles in relation to acceptance of Reference Model for Identity will be analyzed. The analysis will be based on empirical research including feedback from involved organizations, interviews with individuals from selected organizations, conferences, and forums.

Again: Download Amir’s thesis (PDF).

[Note: Almost all links here are in Danish]

The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation will from 1 September 2006 make its online publications and other written communication available in ODF. That was announced by Minister of Science, Helge Sander, during an open consultation meeting in the Science and Technology Committee of the Danish Parliament held on 23 May. Mr Sander said that “the use of open standards is essential to the development of e-government”, and that the decision to publish in ODF is “a first step”, and will be evaluated after a 6-months trial period.

Mr Sander and his ministry has been under pressure for a while on the issue of open standards. The consultation meeting was called after the first reading of Morten Helveg‘s Proposal for Parliamentary Resolution on Open Standards (B103) in the Chamber of the Parliament. The second and final reading is still pending. I summarized the resolution here; it basically goes much further in enforcing open standards.

Mr Sander and the Liberal-Conservative Government has opposed the resolution, which is put forward by the opposition. The resolution does however appeal to not only the opposition parties, but also the Government’s support party (Danish People’s Party, far-right) whose Morten Messerschmidt and Jørgen Dohrman however do hesitate supporting the resolution due to unknown economical effects. Those concerns have been at the heart of the debates, and been Mr Sander’s main argument against the resolution.

On the day before the consultation meeting, the Danish daily newspaper, Berlingske.dk, published a news story, “Secret Report”, where they revealed the conclusions from an internal report from the ministry. Mr Sander promptly decided to send the report to the Committee and hence make it publically available, in order “to avoid any myth creation”, he said. The report is an initial analysis of the economic effects of enfording the use of open standards, and it concludes that although it is not possible to put an exact figure on the total costs (and benefits) of enforcing open standards at large, there is much reason in making open standards compulsory where interoperability is at stake. The report is dated December 2005, but I can reveal that the bulk text is even older, as I was the main author of the report as one of the last tasks I did before I left the ministry in September 2005. I’m glad the report is now public, so I can refer to it. I just re-read it, and although I personally might not agree to everything in it – it being a product of many opinions and “government speak” – it is still a good read, I’d dare say.