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I have created a new blog: BiHblogged, about IT in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Remember I posted Edna’s call? Well, to make a long story short, I can now call myself an International Short Term Expert in Information Technologies, and will spend some time over the coming year in Bosnia. My first mission starts on Monday.

I forgot to blog our new E-Government Strategy 2004-06 – Realising the Potential which was launched last week by the board of Project e-Government, our national steering committee for e-government.

Vision for e-Government

Digitalisation must contribute to the creation of an efficient and coherent public sector with a high quality of service, with citizens and businesses in the centre.

The strategy is summarised in this figure:

And the EU/IDA eGovernment Observatory also did a summary.

I’ve selected a quote about my focus area:

Denmark is well on the way to constructing a coherent infrastructure in which both the technical and legal prerequisites for e-Government are present. However, this does not mean that there is not still much that can and should be done to further improve this foundation. There is a need in a number of areas for a common language, which will require that the data formats used by the individual authorities conform to a common, open, national standard. It is also of central importance that the IT development of individual institutions is in keeping with the development of a common public sector IT architecture, enabling the integration of different IT systems.

On this, the strategy names the following key activities:

• Consolidate the development of a genuine public sector architecture framework, cf. the white book on IT architecture.
• Establish a national IT security concept on the basis of the IT Council’s report on ‘IT Security in the State Sector, 2003’.
• Ensure that citizens and businesses eventually acquire access to their own data.
• Examine the possibilities for establishing a common ‘look and feel’ at State websites, to make it easier for users to utilise other services once they gain familiarity with one of them.
• Analyse the potential for the use of mobile technologies in the public sector.

We are arranging a national conference about architecture for e-government next week, and have a full house, around 400 participants. I think it is fair to say that enterprise architecture is taking on in Denmark, even though our national strategy doesn’t explicitely say so.

The CompTIA whitepaper mentioned here is online now at Softwarechoice.org: European Interoperability Framework – ICT Industry Recommendations (PDF).

I’m going to Bruxelles next week to discuss this and other commentary to EIF. If you want to have a say, send me a mail or a trackback, or send more formal commentary directly to the commission.

In January, I wrote* about the European Interoperability Framework, EIF. The discussion paper has attracted some attention around various corridors, it seems. CompTIA has written a white paper about EIF, which was presented last week to eBIF. I haven’t found a publically available version to link to, but can tell that it, just as one would expect, is full of the usual “choice” talk. CompTIA has not changed since they launched SoftwareChoice.org (where Bruce Perens responded with his SincereChoice.org.

The central issue is about what an open standard means.

The EIF Draft adopts a definition from the Dutch Programme for Open Standards and Open Source Software in Government (OSSOS) which goes like this:
The word “open” is here meant in the sense of fulfilling the following requirements:

• the costs for the use of the standard are low and are not an obstacle to access to it;
• the standard has been published;
• the standard is adopted on the basis of an open decision-making procedure (consensus or majority decision etc);
• the intellectual property rights to the standard are vested in a not-for-profit organisation, which operates a completely free access policy;
• there are no constraints on the re-use of the standard

CompTIA doesn’t like that definition, and wrote a 40 page white paper as a comment to a 24 paged discussion paper, so they must be serious about it.

*: That entry is currently number 1 on Google for ‘European Interoperability Framework’

Update 24 February: The expert search has successfully ended. More later …

Edna Karadza is the Coordinator of the IT review team in an EC funded project tasked with system review of public administration institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has asked me to help finding a qualified person who can help her on the project. Below, I’m posting the terms of reference for such person. If you’re looking for 60 days of hard but probably also extremely interesting – and important – work, and have the requested qualifications, read on.

Edna’s team is tasked with carrying out an assessment (System Review) of the use of information and communication technologies in public administrations in Bosnia and Herzegovina at all levels, with recommendations for possible improvements.

Although I personally don’t know much about public administration in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I know they recently introduced 2.5 million citizen ID cards containing biometric data, so even though they only rank as number 85 in the world in e-government, they do things few others do.

Via OECD, I found the EU/OECD SIGMA programme (Support for Improvement in Governance and Management), which I ought to know, but didn’t until now. From the SIGMA assessment 2002:

BiH: the administrative structure is extremely fragmented; the new legal framework is not compatible across the entities: some parts have introduced common law models to organise the economy, while others have chosen continental models. The Dayton agreement has created severe administrative problems: a proliferation of Prime ministers and different legal frameworks, not only at State and Entity level but also in each canton. These problems will need to be urgently addressed.

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