Gotze.eu

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  • 5th, 4th, now 3rd

    Well, it’s time for me to update a slide in my standard presentation on eGov.

    One of the annual milestones in the eGov community is Accenture’s annual e-government survey. I just found out that the 2005 (fifth) survey is out: Leadership in Customer Service: New Expectations, New Experiences.

    This year’s study revealed four main findings:

    • eGovernment is well advanced and should now be an integral component of a much broader service delivery agenda.
    • Future leadership will be defined by strength in all areas of customer service.
    • Citizens’ willingness to embrace a new generation of services outpaces governments’ ability to deliver them.
    • Governments are making their service investment decisions without a clear view of the outcomes they effect.

    22 countries are included in the survey, and are classified in four groups: the Trendsetters, the Challengers, the Followers and the Formative ones. The two top-ranking trendsetters this year are Canada and the US. Denmark is ranked third (jointly with Singapore) this year, and that’s one up from last year, and two up in two years – so in two years, we will be number one if this is a continuing trend 🙂

  • Enabling Transformation

    The hottest contemporary concept in the eGovernment Architecture Terminology is Transformation, especially as in Transformation Enablement.

    For some time, Canada’s e-government mission has been Enabling Government Transformation. I envy their EA program, called the Business Transformation Enablement Program, BTEP. It seems that the ‘enterprise architecture = transformation enablement’ idea is spreading now.

    In the US, FEA PMO has just released their 2005-2006 FEA PMO Action Plan: Enabling Citizen-Centered Electronic Government which presents the ‘FEA Roadmap to Government Transformation’. Technorati Tags: .

    And as David Fletcher notes, Minnesota’s governor has just announced a Transformation Roadmap for an enterprise model of government. Technorati Tags: .

    In the UK a survey from Kable shows it’s also a phenomenon there, and notes that spending on business transformation service will continue to rise over the next three years, and rise from £1.8bn in 2005-06 to £2.3bn in 2007-08. Also Socitm has learned to say transformation. Technorati Tags: .

    And here’s an example of a transformation happening in the e-gov community: Until recently, the UK-based eGovMonitor was available only as a subscription service. After a transformation process, they now offer an open service, and is now running daily eGov news, announcements and features. The focus is on eGovernment from a management, business-led perspective. So far mainly from a UK perspective, but some international stuff is coming soon, I can safely say (look out for an upcoming contribution from yours truly). They hide it well, but there is a RSS feed. Subscribed.

  • GotzeTools

    Tools for GotzeTagged is a collection of productivity tools for GotzeTagged, my personomy.

    The tools are implementations of some browser tools, for example a useful enhancement of the context menu:

    ConQuery

    Another cool tool is a reinvented editor bookmarklet that works with the current application api and http requests. I created the original bookmarklet 5 years ago, but had to change method as the application was updated over the years. I started using a robot plugin, but it didn’t work well. So, when playing around with the most recent LSQL it was a pleasant surprise that the old method can now be used again.

    The tools are created for Firefox, my preferred browser. If you use anything else: Switch!

    I am still learning how the sidebar works, and the sidebar tool I have released is in pre-alpha state.

    As for sidebars and tabs in Firefox, I cannot get Firefox to transfer http request info between the tabs. I can get Firefox to transfer some content (user in Mycroft), but not stuff like location.href. If I open my bookmarklet in a new tab, I don’t get the same result as I get if I just click it open (new window, which Firefox hides).

  • Sutor’s Two Issues

    Bob Sutor is “beginning to think that the 2 major themes of 2005 are Interoperability and Innovation“. I’m subscribed to his blog thread on interoperability, and hope he is going to travel much in the near future — he told me that he blogs most extensively when travelling, and now he has to blog not only about interop but also about innovation 🙂

  • eGov in eEurope

    Congratulations to my Swedish collegues for being top-ranked in the fifth EU-survey about online availability of public services. Denmark ranks 6th, and somehow managed to score lower than in previous benchmarks.

    ‘This study points to impressive progress in developing and delivering public services on line across the EU. The service delivery gap between new Member States and the pre-enlargement EU 15 is lower than many expected and could close very quickly’

    Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding.

  • Post-conference blog notes

    I’m back from our Conference on Architecture for eGovernment, which attracted almost 500 participants in a slightly too small location. The conference hotel had an over-priced hotspot, but I was too busy to blog it.

    Andreas was there as an exhibitor, and found a pattern in the vendor exhibitions. His conference summary is also great (I’ve technoratified the keywords):

    Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Christian blogged that he has become inspired to start a work blog, but was too busy to actually do so on the spot. Also too busy to blog at all was Signe and Kristian (who couldn’t even stay throughout the conference). And probably a few others, whom I forgot.

  • My iPod

    When in Rome, do as the Romans, they say. So when I was in California, I acquired an iPod Shuffle.

    /ipod.jpg

    I’ve powered it up with some IT Conversations and some podcasts, but also want to use it for music, which however has proven more difficult than expected. Copying ordinary CDs is slow, but otherwise painless. But when going online, things are worse …

    For some reason, Apple has no iTunes Store in Denmark.

    And for some reason, the online music stores in Denmark – such as TDC, Bilka and Jubii – are ipod-unfriendly and only offers WMA-files with DRM, and also generally a small selection (mainly Danish music, which is of course a good thing). Morten wrote a letter.

    Technorati Tags:

  • Going to California

    I’m going to California for a few days for some meetings. If anyone has any suggestions as to what to do on Sunday or on Monday’s President’s Day in San Francisco, get in touch.

    One of the meetings I look most forward to is a visit to Dave Sifry and Technorati.

    If everything works as promised by SAS, my next blog entry will be made at 35,000 feet. Let’s see… tomorrow.

    Technorati Tags: ,

  • Patternsharing

    Microsoft has opened PatternShare, which is

    … a wiki site that aims to increase pattern sharing, dialog, and usage by bringing together people who want to learn proven solutions to common problems from people who have solved them before. The pattern format combined with the flexibility and community ownership of the wiki make the site ideal for this kind of community.

    The wiki is created around the Enterprise Architectural Space Organizing Table, which is

    … a two-dimensional table that captures and organizes business artifacts according to the decisions that produce them. Business artifacts could include plans, notes, models, scripts, code, or other items that different roles in your enterprise use to make decisions and view the enterprise architecture in different ways. The PatternShare uses the table to organize patterns.

    The organizing table is en extended Zachman framework, and is described as “a highly granular map” of “the enterprise space” that is organized by viewpoints, roles, and interrogatives. Read more in Describing the Enterprise Architectural Space, or check this webcast..

    Patternshare.org is based on Flexwiki.
    Appearently on an old version hereof, because it has the old Firefox-bug. That’s really a pity because it creates a lot of noise.

    By using the framework (“organizing table”) as a container of documents, the wiki offers its users the possibility to browse by architectural viewpoints (TableRows), by interrogatives (TableColumns), and by roles (TableRoles). The documents are tagged with simple metadata when entered to the wiki, and the table and lists are generated automatically based on these metadata tags.

    Flexwiki is not the only wiki that is used in EA: Design by wiki: Enterprise Architecture on a Budget. I cannot find any links to live installations of the EA-wikis mentioned there, so it is difficult to compare with Flexwiki. From what I know about the various wikisystems, I would say that Flexwiki could learn a few tricks here and there, but that it does well in comparison. Especially if the coming version 2.0 has just half the feaures they talk about. The intelligent links doesn’t work in Firefox neither, by the way; I had to dig into the page source code to find this link.

    I don’t know where things go wrong. That is, it seems to be a problems in the javascripts, but is it Firefox of Flexwiki that is to blame? Basically, that doesn’t matter – Flexwiki should support other browsers that MSIE.

    Technorati: patternshare

  • Feeding Utah’s CIO

    Government Technology notes that State Web Site Picks Up Government Technology News. It’s about Utah’s state CIO using GovTech’s RSS news feed to display news headlines on their Web site.

    In the story, GovTech’s Nick Mudge also explains that the Utah site uses my Feed2js service. Nick mailed me and asked if Government Technology could promote my service so that state and local governments can use this solution to display news on their Web sites.

    Of course, I said “no problem”. Not only am I glad my server capacity is used by others than spam bots and such. I am also very happy to see RSS being promoted like this. GovTech offers a great number of good, thematic RSS feeds, which not only makes them a good example for other syndicators to follow, but also makes them a valuable resource for an government technology freak like myself.