Gotze.eu

Category: eGovernment

  • A Motion, a Bill, and a Policy

    Just in case anyone missed the recent news: There are three new cases of policy movement for openization: Denmark, Minnesota and Norway.

    Denmark
    Morten Helveg has presented a motion in Parliament (Danish version, dated 30 March, 2006). It says:

    Parliament imposes on the government a duty to ensure that the public sector’s use of IT, including use of software, is based on open standards.

    The state should adopt and maintain a set of open standards by 1 January 2008 which can serve as an inspiration for the rest of the public sector. Open standards should be part of public IT and software procurement with the object of promoting competition.

    The state should ensure that all digital information and data that the public sector exchanges with citizens, companies and institutions, are available in open standards based formats.(my translation of B103

    The wording is the same as in his consultation draft, but the remarks have been updated.

    The likelyhood of the motion being passed as a parliamentary decision is unclear. Coming from the minority opposition, it is almost by definition at risk of being turned down by the Government and its support-party, Dansk Folkeparti, which however seems split on this issue (one of their MPs has supported the motion, another rejected it).

    State of Minnesota
    The Minnesota Open Data Formats Bill, House File 3971 has been presented to the Minnesota state legislature by Paul Thissen and Steve Simon from DFL, Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which is in opposition in the state.

    The bill would require all Executive branch agencies in the state of Minnesota to “use open standards in situations where the other requirements of a project do not make it technically impossible to do this.”

    Andy Updegrove: Bill Introduced in Minnesota to Require Use of “Open Data Formats”

    References:
    Gary Edwards (at Sam Hisers) and Jeff Kaplan

    TechWeb: Minnesota Bill Supports Open Standards

    Norway
    Press release from the Norwegian Ministry of Government Administration and Reform (in Norwegian): Regjeringen satser på åpne IT-standarder

    The press release mentions a cabinet decision about open standards, which contains at least two initiatives. First, Norway will create an interoperability framework, or a standards catalogue, which most likely will contain mandatory standards for state agenices. Second, the government will establish an standardization council with several stakeholders.

    Well done, Norway!

    Essentially, the Norwegian government seems to continue the path towards openization that the former government started about a year ago. The eNorge (eNorway) programme is one of the most ambitious e-government programmes I know of, and it’s good to see it back on track. I’m of course somewhat prejudiced, since one of the major proposals in eNorge is the adoption of an interoperability framework explicitely based on the Danish interoperability framework (disclaimer: I was responsible for establishing this).

    Just in case anyone in Norway reads this: Yes, I’d be happy to work with you, if you need assistance 🙂

    References:

    In English:
    MIT Technology Review: Norway Promoting Open-Source Software
    TMCNet: Norway seeks to reduce dependence on Microsoft, others through open-source programs
    Jeff Kaplan: Norway Out in the Open

    In Norwegian:
    Dagens IT: Vil løsne båndene til Microsoft
    Computerworld.no: Skal bli mindre Microsoft-avhengig
    Digi.no: Vil bli mindre avhengig av Microsoft

    The Meaning of Life
    I have been invited to speak at a Unisys-conference, The Journey to Open Source, held 17 May – 19 May in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. The title of my talk is, as suggested by Unisys, The Meaning of Life – An Academic View on Openization. I’m digging through various research databases and journals in the hope of finding academic literature about openization (open standards, open source, SOA), but it is a rather disappointing exercise. I did similar digging about a year ago, and had hoped to find a bulk of new publications, but unfortunately haven’t found much new material.

    One of the most interesting research projects I know of, is the OStEA project at Copenhagen Business School. OStEA (Open Standards and their Early Adoption) is a public university research project sponsored by the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation. The aim of the project is to identify issues related to government policy with regard to open standards. Some of the research questions pursued are:

    • The viable/plausible scope of open standards as pertaining to the government ICT policy.
    • Identification of relevant standards pool and the relevant ongoing standardization in various fora.
    • Identification of perceived needs for open standards and the reasons and opportunities in government adopting an open standards governance policy.
    • Government’s participation in standardization.
    • Conformance to standards in public procurement/ discrimination against non-compliant standards.

    The project commenced on 1st of February, 2006 and will end on June 24, 2006. Mogens Kühn Pedersen and Vladislav V. Fomin, the research team, have made a preliminary report, Open Standards and Government Policy.

  • Modernising Danish eGov setup

    Danish Computerworld just broke the news about changes in the governance and institutional setup for eGovernment in Denmark. There are as far as I can tell not yet any official announcements, but from what CW says, the Digital Taskforce is merging with two centres in the Ministry of Finance, 11th Office, which deals with modernization issues, and 14th Office, which deals with cutting red tape. The new office is called Office for Administrative Policy (or Public Management, perhaps?).

    Congratulations to Lars Frelle-Petersen, who will be appointed to co-lead this new centre. I’ve worked with Lars for several years, and think he’s the right person to lead the efforts.

    It is my hope that this new centre will take the lead in further developing the national enterprise architecture programme.

  • Judgement Day

    The Digital Taskforce today published the final version (actually marked “pre-public draft”) of the OECD Peer Review of e-Government in Denmark. That’s definately been worth waiting for, and is an absolute must-reader for everyone in e-government and enterprise architecture. The OECD-team has done an outstanding job. Good job, Edwin, Christian, Gustaf, and all!

    The near 200 pages long review is full of good stuff, that should make everyone in Danish e-government not only proud, but also make us think about what we’re doing.

    In line with the decentralised nature of Danish government, and the strong autonomy of local government, the Joint Board does not have any formal powers to decide how, where or when government organisations (other than those of its members) will implement e-government. While this is consistent with Danish traditions of public management, many people interviewed for this review felt that more mandatory e-government requirements would help achieve even stronger results – especially in relation to adoption of the Danish “enterprise architecture” and related technical standards. Government-wide adoption of the enterprise architecture and standards for such things as ICT system and data interoperability is now widely acknowledged by OECD countries as being leading-edge e-government practice, supporting objectives such as increased efficiency, collaborative services delivery, and increased competitiveness of ICT industries. To achieve a full measure of these benefits, adoption of architectures and standards must be as widespread as possible. The question of how to respond to this situation is central to the ongoing progress of e-government in Denmark. (p. 9)

    The review examined the impact of various national strategies/initiatives:

    To which the reviewers comment:

    While these results are very positive, the fact that only 30% of respondents identified the Danish enterprise architecture as a significant driver, and only 12% cited the public sector modernisation programme, indicates that some aspects of e-government may benefit from more attention and leadership from the Joint Board.

    Under Proposals for action, we find:

    2. The Government could respond to widespread calls, from both within and outside government, to make certain aspects of e-government mandatory by assessing: 1) where, when and how moving away from the current approach of voluntarism might improve the results being achieved through e-government; and 2) what risks might arise from such a shift, both for individual organisations and government as a whole. Any such assessment could focus, in particular, on issues and options for change in the area of implementation of the Danish enterprise architecture and related technical standards.

    16. Collaboration between government organisations is a key to achieving Denmark’s e-government goals. Much effort has been put into providing co-ordination, and common ICT infrastructures and frameworks in support of better collaboration. While resources are still committed to their ongoing development, it is now important that these frameworks be widely translated by individual organisations into e-government systems, services and processes. The Government should examine the adequacy and/or efficacy of incentives that exist for government organisations to adopt or align with these e-government frameworks, and alter them as required. In particular, in relation to the Danish enterprise architecture and associated technical standards, the Government should examine issues around translating these from concepts into actual implementations, and consider what actions can be taken to address them.

    The OECD survey examined the technological challenges, and found that sharing standards and infrastructure among agencies was the single most important issue identified:

    The reviewers say:

    This result emphasises the importance of the work Denmark is doing in developing an enterprise architecture and other arrangements for achieving interoperability of information systems and data. It may also reflect the significant managerial and cultural challenges that accompany technological issues in this area of e-government.

    On EA, the review identifies two major concerns:

    • A major concern that, while the enterprise architecture and supporting standards and frameworks have been very well developed at the conceptual level, they are proving more difficult to translate into the actual standards and schemas required for implementation. Many people working to implement the architecture find it abstract and difficult to understand.
    • A second major concern that, while municipalities are solidly committed to the concept of enterprise architecture and common standards, their heavy reliance on one ICT vendor that provides them with many proprietary (i.e. non-standard) systems significantly slows the pace of their adoption of standards, and therefore the rate at which collaborative e-government goals can be achieved.

    All in all, the review mentions ‘enterprise architecture’ 53 times throughout the report. That should hopefully stimulate advances in the debates about EA, and as I said, make some of us think about where we’re going. Clearly, EA is important to advances in e-government. I’ve said that for years now, but it’s great to see OECD making the outcry so strongly as they do.

  • Campaigning for e-government

    Use us

    Today, The Digital Taskforce launched a large campaign about government online services in Denmark. The campaign will involve TV spots with Danish actors Lars Bom and Søren Fauli and other out-reach methods such as internet banners, radio spots, newspaper ads, bus ads, and other local campaigns.

    The campaign is a joint effort involving more than 70 partners throughtout government, and will run for around 3 months.

    Civil servants can win a pie if they tell their stories.

    Campaign Stamp

  • 20 standards for interoperability

    Here in Denmark, our Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Mr Helge Sander, today announced a list of 20 standards that are found essential to the on-going reform in the public sector. The list is presented together with Local Government Denmark (LGDK) and Danish Regions. The list contains almost only open standards (Norway, check this!), and is a kind of “Best of the Interoperability Framework.

    Disclosure: I work for Mr Sander, and have been heavily involved in making this list.

    The list, which is only available in Danish, contains the following standards:

    • XHTML
    • WAI Level 2
    • WSRP 1.0
    • UTF-8
    • RSS 2.0
    • PDF Reference v. 1.5
    • Government Digital Signature (OCES)
    • XML 1.0
    • XML Schema 1.0
    • OIOXML NDR
    • UML 2.0
    • FESD-datamodel (document management data model)
    • FESD-datastandarder (document management metadata standards)
    • WS-I Basic Profile 1.1
    • WS-Security
    • XML Signature
    • XML Encryption
    • LDAP 3.0
    • SAML
    • DS484 (National standard for security processes)

    I welcome comments and press inquiries (+45 40605727).

  • Interoperability and standards

    As reported by Geir Nøklebye, and picked up by Slashdot, Phil Windley and others, the Norweigian government has presented a new plan for information technology in Norway. At the press conference yesterday, the Norwegian Minister of Modernization Morten Andreas Meyer declared “Proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government”, Nøklebye reports.

    The Norwegian plan is called eNorge 2009. It is only available in Norwegian (indeed only in one of the Norwegian languages; fortunately the one I understand), but I hope they will translate it. In my translation, here are two very central quotes on open standards:

    “Public authorities must use open standards in their IT and information systems. Deviations from this must be substantiated.”
    …
    “By 2009, all new IT and information systems in the public sector must use open standards.”

    The plan introduces the term Government Standards (forvaltningsstandarder), and emphasises that such must be based on open standards. By 2006, Government Standards for data and document exchange must be established, the plan says.

    Way to go, Norway!! That’s a pretty bold move. And also, I think, one that will pose a few challenges.

    A couple of days ago, IBMs Tom Glover, who serves as president and chairman of WS-I, wrote about Barriers to Interoperability. Tom notes that interoperability is often achieved through the use of standards. He presents a 10-point list of standards-related but non-technical barriers to interoperability:

    • Closed policies, processes, and development groups
    • Intellectual property encumbrances
    • Lack of rigor in standards development
    • Misuse of standards as a means to erect barriers to competition and trade
    • Challenges obtaining standards credentials
    • Creating standards which don’t work together
    • Competition to create standards
    • Domain specific terms, concepts, etc.
    • Large, complex, “all or nothing” standards
    • Lack of standards clarity or awareness

    I think these 10 barriers (read about them in Tom’s blog) are all relevant and real.

    The challenge question is what do we do about these barriers? Live with them? Destroy them? Work with/around them? Command and control? Compliance enforcement? The Norwegian plan says that further investigations into the means of realising the policy must be made. That is pretty much where we in Denmark have started, that is, by looking at ways to actually realise the usage of open standards, and by investigating the potential consequences hereof on society, the economy and market situation. As I have already mentioned, I am very interested in connecting with anyone looking at the econometrics of open standards.

    For understanding standard compliance management, Anthony Finkelstein has drawn a useful map:
    comppliance.png

    Maps like this are useful, and we need stuff like this to achieve the goal of openization. Basically, openization is a process, or perhaps rather, a web of interrelated processes. I’ll write more on openization soon, and look forward to being able to announce significant news on this soon too 🙂

    Anyway, I think we – and here I especially mean governments like Norway – should look wide and far for inspiration to our work. For example, when in another context I was rereading Chris Argyris and thinking about his ladder of inference model, I found his ideas relevant to our discussions here: When talking about open standards and interoperability, Don’t Leap Up That Ladder of Inference!

  • Creative Interoperability

    On Friday evening, we launched a new release of our National e-Government Interoperability Framework. The site is bilingual (Danish and English), but the press release is only in Danish.

    The new release is a maintainance release, but has some important news. The Danish name “Referenceprofilen” (the reference profile) has been retired, and it is now called “OIO-kataloget” (OIO Catalogue). We’ve adopted a number of new standards too, and changed the recommendations on some too – for example, SAML is now a recommended standard.

    I’m also happy to announce that the complete interoperability framework has been published under a Creative Commons License. Let the sampling begin! There’s an experimental webservice, RSS-feeds and more ways to get to the content. Read more on our site, and do let me know if you want to help test the webservice or want any information about the framework.

  • 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 🙂

  • 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.