Gotze.eu

Category: eGovernment

  • 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.

  • Tagging eGovernment

    ‘Tags’ have become popular with services like del.icio.us, and now Technorati Tags ( explained). This has prompted me to play around with tags (GotzeTagged, below).

    Tags
    A tag is here understood as a simple category name, or a bit of metadata about whatever it is about.

    With del.icio.us and the likes, tagging becomes a social activity, and that is what makes these new services interesting. And challenging …

    For example, which of the following tags is “correct”: , or ?

    I’ll be using egovernment. This is the name of the relevant blog category here, with Dave and with Phil.

    If your blog tool/CMS does not support categories/tags, include the following code in your blog:

    <a xhref="http://technorati.com/tag/egovernment" mce_href="http://technorati.com/tag/egovernment" rel="tag">egovernment</a>

    GotzeTagged
    I have been running GotzeLinked for quite a while (since 1997 or so), so I have been “tagging” the web for quite a while. One of the lasting challenges is about the choice of categories, and the relations between the categories. One of the most recently added categories is GotzeTagged: eGovernment.

    GotzeTagged makes use of various external services, such as del.icio.us, MSN News, and Amazon (UK). I’m still working on some improvements to the user interface.

  • Interoperable Europe

    EPAN, the network of European Directors-General responsible for public administration, has released a resolution from their 43th meeting. From the resolution:

    4. The Directors General are of the opinion that transformation requires an integral approach, taking into account organizational, HRM, legal and financial aspects, as well as an adequate information infrastructure (including e.g. authentication mechanisms and basic registers) and interoperability frameworks based on open standards.

    On the last bit, it is also worth noting related recent news: The Final version 1.0 of the European Interoperability Framework was released the other week after a long process. A few updates since the consultation draft have been made, so even if you know the EIF, read the official version!

    I am not sure how many member states have “implemented” EIF’s main recommendation (creation of national interopframeworks). UK. France (where?). Germany. Denmark. There must be more.

  • Directly to government

    Ian Cuddy from eGov monitor has an interesting story: UK.Gov Enters Search Listing Stakes.

    Indeed, : This Google Search for driving test has a placed ad for Directgov.

    I don’t know. Why not?

    I don’t think anyone in Denmark has done so – targetting the search engines, that is. But many other forms of outreach and promotion have been made. For example, for several years, my agency ran a netcafé at the Roskilde Festival. But I guess it is mainly some of the private-public partnership initiatives, or outsourced solutions such as our digital signature, that have used ads.

    Sidenote to directgov: It’s a pity that we users of Firefox are still left with a partly dysfuntional website, which however almost validates, so it might well be a firefox thing, so whom to bash on is questionable, of course.

  • Blogging identity

    I have helped my collegue Søren Peter Nielsen starting up a new blog, the IAM Blog. It is a thematic blog about Identity and Access Management in e-Government.

    Subscribed. And so should everyone interested in one of the most essential e-government challenges.

  • Back from Bosnia

    I am back from another mission in Bosnia. We were doing site-visits and other review work in the Brcko District. I can’t talk about our findings yet, but will seek clearence, since there are some interesting stories.

    The official website for the district is a whole story in itself, that I look forward to talk more about. The website was operational for a while (WaybackMachine), but has been under reconstruction for a long time. Due to reopen again pretty soon, we were told.

    Speaking of reopenings, I was of course in Bosnia at a special time: The opening of the restored Old Bridge in Mostar. Having tried regional transport during the week, I opted not to go to Mostar, and ended watching the opening event on television.

    When I travel, I always bring books. This time, I brought Francis Fukuyama‘s State Building (US). I am normally not a big fan of Fukuyama, but found this book very good and will without doubt recommend it to anyone interested in this important theme, state-building. One of the many good points Fukuyama makes is a strong distinction between state-building and nation-building, and about the scope of states, and their strength. He has a short article in The Observer about this.

    I took a number of pictures on my new OLYMPUS CAMEDIA C-310 Digital Camera. I have prepared a photo album on my TypePad site, but still need to transfer the pictures. And I also need to learn to remember to bring the camera whereever I go … I forgot it most of the time and didn’t get to take that many pictures.

  • Connecting the dots?

    Brian Kane’s thesis from ITU (this ITU) about Danish public IT strategy, Connecting The Dots – Why Danish IT architecture does not result in interoperability is a critical analysis of our work.
    Download (big PDF), Executive summary.

    Brian’s core findings include:

    • Both the general standards and recommendations and the specific case of the FESD project reflect an understanding of interoperability as being the exchange of business documents.
    • Guidance on how to expose systems as services following the concept of service oriented architecture is vague at best. Specifications are too broad and unspecific to be implemented in a consistent manner.
    • There is no coherent way of resolving the physical or semantic problems when two domains of control meet.
    • Most relevant standards are authorized for use, some overlapping and conflicting, but no guidelines are in place for when to use which standards and how.
    • Towards the goal of service oriented architecture, a sound underlying, perhaps publicly controlled, integration infrastructure is needed.
    • There is a need for a long-term roadmap covering IT architectural efforts in the decades to come. The roadmap should clearly describe the current IT architectural situation, and include an explicit statement of strategic goals and operationalized milestones.

    Conclusion:

    While important work is being done at data model level, the task of moving data from application to application is only vaguely described. In conclusion, Danish IT architectural work can currently best be described as initial, informal and ad-hoc.

    Thank you, Brian, for such an impressive contribution to the on-going dialogues and deliberations about architecture for e-government.

  • We have reached a plateau

    Accenture News Release about their annual report on e-gov maturity: eGovernment Leadership: High Performance, Maximum Value PDF.

    The study identified five major trends in eGovernment today:

    1. eGovernment advances are diminishing.
    2. eGovernment leaders are reaping tangible savings.
    3. Promoting take-up is taking hold, but the challenge remains.
    4. The integration challenge is changing.
    5. Personalization is emerging.

    Here is what they say about Denmark:

    Denmark remained in fourth place in the rankings this year, joined by Australia, Finland and Sweden. It made little measurable progress in overall maturity, with its score improving by less than 1 percent.
    …
    Denmark’s progress slowed in 2003 – not as a result of any mistakes, but from what we have seen to be a common slow-down after a period of rapid development. Denmark seems to have reached a plateau. Taking the next step in maturity will require a reevaluation of objectives and a resulting change in approach. Denmark is already taking the first step of reassessing its eGovernment goals. Now it will need to develop a corresponding action plan that improves its service depth and customer relationship management maturity and encourages more people to use eGovernment services.

    A plateau? Strange, I thought we were still climbing the mountain.

    News coverage:
    CA: Government of Canada, ITWorldCanada, Ottawa Business Journal

    DK: Computerworld Online, Yahoo Danmark

  • European Speaking Tour

    Conference season, I guess. I’ll be doing a number of conferences in the near future.

    Next week, I’ll be in Sarajevo for a government conference about IT in the public administration in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

    I will also attend and speak at the following conferences:

    European e-Government Exchange
    Making Customer Relationship Management A Reality In The Public Sector
    Date: May 17-18, 2004
    Location: Brussels

    Business Process Management
    Orchestrating people, processes and technology for improved performance and agility
    Date: 26 – 28 May 2004
    Location: Kingsway Hall, London

    The Adaptable Enterprise
    Assessing the potential of utility computing to transform business processes
    Date: 16 – 18 Jun 2004
    Location: The Royal Garden Hotel, London

    Drop me a mail if you plan to attend any of these.

  • Irish SOA

    Sean McGrath and Conor O’Reilly: A Service Oriented Approach to e-Government Architecture. About the approach taken to using Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and XML representations of data as the basis for service delivery and modernization of e-government in Ireland.

    Flexible and reusable e-government services based on an open data standards and non-proprietary technologies are emerging. In Ireland we are currently in the implementation phase of the Public Services Broker (PSB).

    The PSB is an SOA. It will provide a common access point for e-Government services, common interface standards, procedures and supporting services, together with the necessary infrastructure to make access to e-Government services as straightforward and secure as possible. In addition to supporting customer interaction, the PSB will also provide the standard mechanism for supporting government inter-agency collaboration.

    Although I hear about many advantages with a central broker from Alan Mather and many others, I personally don’t think it is the right way forward, at least not when I look at things in Denmark. On the other hand, if the broker can enable a service-oriented and loosely coupled architecture, why not?