Gotze.eu

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  • Using IT Wisely

    Today Denmark ranks among the world’s leading IT nations. This position should not only be maintained, but also strengthened.

    That’s the message in Using IT Wisely, the Danish Government’s IT and Telecommunications Policy Action Plan. It was published in Danish in October 2003, and this week the English translation came. The Action Plan shows that we have already come a long way in realizing the 37 initiatives introduced in the 2002 Action Plan “IT for All“.

    The Action Plan mentions our architecture work, the Reference Profile and much more initiatives.

  • Use it-standards now!

    Use it-standards now! That’s what we said in today’s press release (in Danish) about the Reference Profile, the Danish e-GIF. The public consultation is hereby open, and runs until 1 May. Sadly, we haven’t found time to translate it to English, yet.

    Our communications director told me that a TV-journalist replied: I don’t understand it.
    Well, I never expected it to be main-stream news stuff anyway. In-ter-op-e-ra-bi-li-ty.

    The Danish IT-press picked up our story though. Check ComON (syndicated on Jubii and Computer Reseller News), and Computerworld (syndicated on TV2).

  • Use the Net

    Søren and I are getting ready for the EA-T8 class, which starts tomorrow. Teaching material, term schedule, lecture plan, reading list, and more. We have been looking at various e-learning/groupware systems. The university offers us a SiteScape platform, but we are not very impressed with it (it’s overkill) and are considering alternatives. Everyone who knows me shouldn’t be surprised when I say that I have suggested we use blogs. Søren is more fond of Usenet/NNTP. So, we now look at ways to use blogs and usenet together. Therein also lies some good architectural issues, which we can use in the learning process with the students.

    Blogs and UseNet together then? Rather than being two overlapping channels of communication, they should be seen together as enabling one, integrated user experience. Ideally. But how?

    1. Replacing blog comments with a link to the UseNet group.
    2. Exposing UseNet postings in the blogs.
    3. Posting blog postings in a UseNet group??
    4. ??

    Maybe step one and two are “good enough”? But how do you reference a UseNet posting? Does it have an URL? Or can it be referenced in other ways? Well, it can be made available in other ways than a UseNet-reader, which will be essential for step 2. On this Mihai Parparita, a CS student at Princeton, comes to the rescue:

    I’m not a big Usenet person, and checking said newsgroups would involve me having to remember to go out of my way and fire up Pine. However, since (timely) announcements are often posted in newsgroups, reading them regularly is necessary. One thing that I check often (perhaps too often) is my RSS newsreader, so the obvious thing to do would be to bring newsgroups to it.

    So, Mihai created a bridge between NNTP and RSS (NNTP2RSS). A simple Perl script is all that is needed. I installed it, and it works great. Thanks Mihai!

    RSS2NNTP (step 3) would mainly be an offer to those who want everything in a UseNet newsreader. Open sourced nntp//rss does exactly that, by making RSS-feeds available in dedicated NNTP groups. I haven’t tried installing it (it’s some java-stuff, urgh, help!).

    Challenge: Threading vs linerity! NNTP uses/allows infinite threading. Blogs/RSS don’t. Does Atom??

  • Denmark picks UBL

    Denmark has formally adopted the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) as a standard for e-Commerce in the public sector. EBizQ reports:

    With a public sector procurement of goods and services for approximately DKK 100 billion per year, even modest improvements in efficiency will be of great value for Danish society. By virtue of the public sector’s purchasing volume, increased use of e-commerce will furthermore contribute to the penetration of e-commerce in Denmark in general. The suppliers will get accustomed to e-commerce and an infrastructure will be established. Particularly favourable arrangements have been made to secure access by small suppliers.

    Following a public hearing, the Danish XML Committee decided to use UBL 0.7 to enable integration between systems controlled by state authorities and our newly implemented portal for public procurement. When UBL 1.0 is stable, a transition is already planned for, my collegue Michael Bang Kjeldgaard, and chair of our National XML Comittee, told me.

    Jon Bosak of Sun Microsystems, chair of the OASIS UBL Technical Committee and organizer of the working group that created XML agrees:

    “In adopting UBL, Denmark takes the lead in establishing an open, non-proprietary e-commerce environment equally suitable for both governments and small businesses. UBL’s vendor-neutral development process and free licensing makes it a natural choice for government procurement, and I believe that this announcement will jump start UBL adoption by governments across Europe.”

    Anyone technically interested can look up the schemas we use.

    The OASIS e-Government Technical Committee has launched egovernment.xml.org. Not much there yet. They could add a link to our OIO.dk XML-section, but it’s mainly in Danish. We’re working on material in English.

  • Observing EA

    The excellent European eGovernment Observatory publishes an eGovernment Newsletter, “A quarterly report providing insight on the most relevant developments of the last months”. I have just accepted an invitation to write an article about our work on enterprise architecture for the newsletter, thanking the editor for considering our work “most relevant developments of the last months”. So, if you don’t already subscribe to the newsletter, do so now 🙂

    I don’t quite know how much time I have to finish the article, but I have been asked to write about:

    – What is Enterprise Architecture and is why is it important for e-government success?
    – Is it possible to simply transpose EA concepts and tools from the private sector to government, or are there some public sector specificities that make EA slightly different in government than in private corporations?
    – Most European governments have worked out interoperability frameworks and government-wide service delivery infrastructures before starting to work on EA. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to work out an EA framework first?
    – What has been done in Denmark and what can be learned from the Danish experience?
    – What are other governments doing in the field of EA, in the US but especially in Europe?

    OK. Some quick thoughts:
    – EA is basically about bringing sense into our e-government work. IT does matter, but it is our “business”, or mission, that counts.
    – Compared to the private sector: “slightly different”, you bet. I think EA makes a lot of sense to any enterprise. In a private enterprise, where the boundaries are well-defined, it makes immediate sense. But for government, what is the enterprise? The whole of government? A sector (health, environment, etc)? A domain (e.g. “medication at home”, which crosses over between health and social affairs)? A ministry? An agency? A major challenge to EA in government is to define the boundaries of the enterprise for which you’re doing architecture.
    – framework first? Maybe, but you can’t really look at things like that. But yes, EA should be all-inclusive, and too many projects running ahead without coordination can be dangerous.

  • Standards Repositories

    eGov monitor reports about changes to the UK e-GIF. Appearently, an ‘e-GIF Registry’ is planned for. But (from email newletter):

    The Office of the e-Envoy was today unwilling to give out further details about the project, or the thinking behind it, commenting that: “The e-GIF repository is still in the early stages of discussion, there is no further information available at this time.”

    Whenever we go public with our Danish e-GIF, it will from the start be a repository, and a web service, and … I guess I should tell the Brits that they’re not the first to do this 😉

    The Reference Profile, as we call it, should be available very soon. Smart googlers can find links to it “out there” already …

  • 10 on RSS

    A while ago, Dave Winer gave 10 reasons why RSS Rules. Dylan Greene now offers 10 reasons why RSS is not ready for prime time.

    10 reasons why RSS is important to me:

    This could easily become a 100 reasons or more, if need be.

    Not that RSS is perfect. The One-click RSS subscriptions and other usability issues are not trivial. And then there’s the business model. What is stuff like rssads.com going to bring?

  • European Interoperability

    A first public draft version of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) is now available.

    EIF

    The eEurope Action Plan 2005 calls on the European Commission ‘to issue an agreed interoperability framework to support the delivery of pan-European eGovernment services to citizens and enterprises. It will address information content and recommend technical policies and specifications for joining up public administration information systems across the EU. It will be based on open standards and encourage the use of open source software’ (Action Plan page 10).

    I’m the Danish representative in the working group that created the EIF.

  • EA PhD

    Click for larger version Photo: Jakob Dall

    Kristian Hjort-Madsen (sitting) is officially now a PhD student. We signed the papers yesterday.

    On the picture, from left:
    Me, Kristian’s supervisor
    Jørgen Abild Andersen, director of the National IT and Telecom Agency
    Sten Davidsen, vice-director in KMD
    Thomas Gregers Honoré, software director in IBM, and
    Mads Tofte, president of the IT University.

    My first task as supervisor will be to get Kristian to start a blog.

  • Of course

    S�ren pointed me to two more, relevant publications for the EA course. These are:

    Christopher Alexander‘s classic A Pattern Language. At least the introduction should be used.

    Patterns for e-business: A Strategy for Reuse by Jonathan Adams, Srinivas Koushik, Guru Vasudeva, George Galambos, 2001. ISBN: 1-931182-02-7. Chapter 2-4.

    The book is not online, but IBM’s e-business experts do put lots of good stuff online. For example, the Patterns: Applying Pattern Approaches Redbook, and the Patterns: Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services Redbook.

    The latter might be useful when we go into the SOA issue, which we of course will. Here are more to the list then:

    G�tze, Hjort-Madsen, Nielsen (forthcoming) SOA p� dansk. (SOA in Danish)

    Lublinksy and Tyomkin (2003) Dissecting Service-Oriented Architectures

    Martin Fowler (2002) Web Services: Pathway to a Service-Oriented Architecture?

    What else here?