Category: eGovernment

David Fletcher and I share a passion for RSS. Dave’s goal is to have all Utah agencies produce their news in RSS. A beautiful vision. By also taking the lead in guidelines for government RSS, Utah is the government RSS place to watch.

Unless you count in the Danish solution, of course 😉 We built a service that scrapes press releases from all public sector websites in Denmark, indexes them and automagically categorises them into a set of public “metainformationsets” (called OIOXML “theme/type”-metadata), and then allows users to search in one database. I hope we can soon get these search results available in RSS, so we can make our experiences with Government RSS.

Phil Windley points to an interesting article he wrote in Digital ID World.

The Danish Civil Registration System was created in 1968 by digitising the contents of the manually kept municipal civil registers, and giving each citizen a civil registration number, which has since served as a unique ID number. We first went into the debates about digital ID long ago, but “burned our hands” on Big Brother talk. That was more than 15 years ago. For the past couple of years, all the debates of course have returned. The thing now is about digital signatures more than ID-cards. We are very close to finding a solution here. We’ve had a project competition, and our signature group is closing in on the winners, which should be announced by the end of this month.

Phil Windley’s talk was one of the reasons I am sorry I didn’t have a chance to participate in Susan Turnbull’s Universal Access Collaboration Expedition. I’m on her invitation list, and always hate to miss the events, but it’s good to follow what she’s up to.

Phil’s web services manifesto is about defining web services, and he puts forward some old as well as some new thoughts. I like the open definition of web services, and the design principles.

IMHO an eGov web services manifesto must be a bit wider than the one Phil suggests. It needs to embrace the core architectural principles in a wider context (“federated enterprise” kind of way). But if it were up to me, the open definition and the design principles would embrace those Phil raises.

There is also a bit more to say about life events, but Phil makes a good and clear point there, which I’d like to use. We have a lot of experience here in Denmark with thinking in life events. There has been a tendency to think “one life event” = “one portal”, but fortunately, we have moved ahead and now think in terms of service communities and partnerships.

Speaking of presentations, I have been asked to nominate three contemporary trends in e-government with three good examples showing these trends. Any nominations? (Alan, can you send me three powerpoints about GG, please ? 😉

Reuters: Microsoft Opens Guarded Source Code to Governments : To woo governments, Microsoft said it will make its source code available to government agencies over the Internet, provided they do not disclose that code. They will also be required to sign contracts, but will not have to pay for access.

The Register comments: It’s a trap. Don’t go there…, and writes:

Remarkably, this “unprecedented move” (Reuters) looks not entirely dissimilar to the Microsoft Government Shared Source Licensing Program, which has been available (to general disinterest) for some considerable time.

Helen Jung, AP Business Writer, reports that Michael Gartenberg, research director for Jupiter Research, commented:

“It’s a brilliant maneuver … It gives them a huge (public relations) win, gives them a response back to the open-source folks and also provides the impetus that many of the government organizations have been looking for to continue doing business with them.”

Michael Gartenberg wrote that and a bit more in his new Analyst Weblog, and it seems the AP writer picked that story up for her own story. Interesting.

FCW (Council advises architecture security) and GCN (CIO Council: Protect your architecture data) mentions what must be the shortest memorandum I have seen. It is so short that I’ll quote it in full:

NOTE TO CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICERS And Security Officers

FROM: Mark Forman, Associate Director for IT and E-gov, OMB
Karen Evans, CIO Council Vice-Chair
Van Hitch, CIO Council Security Liasion

SUBJECT: Securing Enterprise Architecture Software
_______________________________________________________________________

We want to take this opportunity to highlight the importance of applying IT security practices to Enterprise Architecture tools. Given the importance of Enterprise Architecture (EA) “applications” — software tools that facilitate the development, documentation or analysis of an organization’s enterprise architecture — and the detailed information they and associated data bases contain regarding agency assets and processes, agency EA applications and associated data bases should be considered mission critical IT investments. Accordingly, we want to remind you that these applications must be appropriately secured to protect against the harm resulting from the loss, misuse, or unauthorized access to or modification of information. Agencies should do so consistent with the requirements of the Government Information Security Reform Act (now FISMA, the Federal Information Security Management Act). Agencies should discuss actions to secure these systems as part of the next quarterly update of agency plans of action and milestones.

Yesterday, Eric Raymond published the 8th Halloween Document: Doing the Damage-Control Dance. The Halloween documents are assumed leaked memos from Microsoft, and always interesting reads. This new one, which Raymond says confirms that we are advancing through GandhiCon Three (Gandhi once said, First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.), is particularly interesting for us working in government, because it’s all about us (Subject: “OSS and Goverment”). Orlando Ayala, Group Vice President of Microsoft’s Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Services Group is quoted for writing:

We need to more effectively respond to press reports regarding Governments and other major institutions considering OSS alternatives to our products. We must be prepared to respond to announcements, such as this one by the Japan Government (or prior announcements in Peru, Germany etc) quickly and with facts to counter the perception that large institutions are deploying OSS or Linux, when they are only considering or just piloting the technology. Announcements by governments are reported quickly around the world and require more coordination. In several instances, our ability to communicate effectively has been hindered by a lack of integration across groups in Redmond and the subsidiaries.

The memo then goes on explaining What to Escalate and How to Escalate. Monitor and talk with Redmond.

So, in case anyone from Microsoft reads this, here’s a sincere suggestion: Check
GOL-IN‘s Open Source in eGovernment news service. Full disclosure: I run that service. I try to keep track of all news related to OSS and government. The directory is open, so everyone can add links.

Alan Mather’s e-Government @large blog turned one year old the other day. (Late) Happy Birthday, Alan!

Simon Moores’ Thought for Christmas was about the year that was. He writes: “When you go to Mather’s innocuous sounding DiverDiver Blog, you’ll see that he has added links to other blogs written by many of the leading independent thinkers on e-government. Where else would one find that kind of debate, I wonder? So blogging has my vote as one of the more important conceptual developments of 2002.”

I’ve personally been blogging for about two-and-a-half years now, but must say that the past year has been something special. Much thanks to Alan, Simon, and the many other newcomers to blogging. Honourable mention goes to the Utah govbloggers Phil Windley and David Fletcher, who runs two of the best new blogs around. I hope Phil keeps blogging after tomorrow (his last day on the job), and I also hope that David and the others in the Utah govblogroll will continue their blogging in the new year. The Utah govblogroll is IMHO the best thing that has happened in e-government this year. There are a number of worthy contesters to that prize, among them Alan’s blog, but Utah takes the prize.

2002 has been an interesting year in e-government. At least in Denmark, where we have started implementing an e-government strategy for the nation. In January, the National E-government Board said: “The e-government vision is to systematically use digital technologies to introduce new ways of thinking and transform organisations and work processes to improve the quality of service and efficiency” in their Towards e-government – vision and strategy for the public sector in Denmark.

Shamelessly, I will argue that the white paper my group has been working on, and released internally just before we went on holidays, has been the highlight of Danish e-government strategy implementation in 2002. It’ll be a bit into 2003 before the white paper will be published, but the work was done in 2002. I hope that’s not wishfull thinking … I know from friends and collegues around the world that setting dates for white papers is dangerous business. After we in September launched our green paper on these issues, we have probably raised expectations to the white paper. So, let’s see what will be said about it, when people see it. I guess some will be disappointed, but that will be because they don’t understand the context, in which the white paper is no less than a revolution, even if it will be “softened” in the process.

The white paper, which I will ask my boss for money to translate in full, is about what they in North America calls Federal Enterprise Arhcitecture. In Denmark, we talk about a national/government-wide architecture framework for e-government, and have not just copied the American way of doing it. We have looked at their work, even talked with them, and are inspired by them. Perhaps more by Canada than the US, BTW, mainly because our insourced coach Allan Bo Rasmussen from META Group brought in Brian Burke, who were deeply involved in making Canada’s Federated Architecture Program (FAP) a few years ago.

Our white paper basically argues that we need a government-wide (national, regional, and local) architecture framework, which involves three activity areas: 1. Governance framework, “the architecture”, 2. Principles, e.g., Reference Profiles (what UK/NZ/AUS calls e-GIF), and 3. Services, and collaborative such too.

Speaking of services: Come 2003, the service community for geodata will open its services. Gotta check them out, and see if I can make a few web services with them.

What should a government policy for the architecture of e-government in Denmark involve? Some central keywords are, I think, bleeding edge technologies (XML, web services, etc), open standards, governance, service communities, sourcing strategies, schema/pattern communities, and communities of practice.

eGov architecture policy is (at least) about ‘architecting’ or designing an architectural framework, not unlike the US model (FEA), where focus is put on getting business to drive the technological development. But it also involves taking on a governing role concerning technological standards. Here, we’ll work on an e-GIF as well as infrastructural patterns.

It is also about community building. We’re building a platform for government-wide communities of practice for various practitioners, who will participate in a semiformal process of standardisation, schema development, pattern language development, metadata user groups, etc.

Govblogger Phil Windley resigns as CIO for the state of Utah 🙁

There goes an innovative leader. Great loss to Utah, but also a great loss to the eGovernment community at large, not to mention the blogger community. It is indeed a sad day.

Phil points to Wisconsin Enterprise Standards – 403: XML / SOAP Initiative.

The XML/SOAP Standards Initiative intended to develop “a set of statewide standards, guidelines, best practices, and other materials to assist state agencies in implementing XML and SOAP.” and the final standard is worth checking out. Maybe worth copying 😉