Andrea Di MaioThe interoperability of technologies, data and applications across different government agencies, tiers and jurisdictions has been a keystone of e-government and government transformation programs for almost a decade. The nirvana of any such program is to achieve seamless integration between processes and applications, to make the structure of government invisible (or irrelevant) to service delivery, and to set the basis for agile, truly transformational government.
Jurisdictions worldwide have published government interoperability frameworks in multiple versions (see a few examples from the UK, Germany, Australia, Denmark, New Zealand) and all these have helped move technical interoperability in the right direction. Compatible technical architectures or document standards are necessary conditions for processes and applications to interoperate, but they are not sufficient. As the European Commission’s work on the European Interoperability Framework shows, there are several level of interoperability, and technical is just one: the toughest ones are semantic (do data have the same meaning?), organizational (are processes compatible?), legal (do similar laws apply to the same issues?).
This reminds me of when I was doing research on software reusability, back in the late 80′s. At the time, barriers to software reuse were technical (i.e. different platforms, operating systems, programming languages) as well as organizational (i.e. reuse cost models, design methods and processes). However even with most of those technical challenges overcome (by the adoption of open standards and more and more technically interoperable platforms), reuse is still relatively low, because organizational challenges are far more difficult to solve.
The same applies to interoperability: we can have all countries and regions using the same (open) standards, and yet data models may be incompatible. Technical interoperability provides a common lexicon and part of a common syntax, but can’t help with semantics. The realm of semantic and organizational interoperability dangerously borders whole-of-government enterprise architecture, another venture that has rarely provided much value, besides creating a context for compliance and scrutiny.
An interesting question to pose is: how much more effort will be put on cracking the toughest interoperability problems, taking into account the difficult times ahead? This question would clearly be amenable to some scenaric planning, but let me just take the most controversial view. If this is going to be a long and deep recession and governments need to deploy exceptional resources to sustain economic development and social cohesion within their respective boundaries, government interoperability may become irrelevant.
Let me start with the counterargument to my own thesis. In order to rapidly achieve challenging political objectives around economic recovery and job protection and creation, different government agencies and tiers need to collaborate more effectively and efficiently. Focus on national and local priorities will cause efforts like “European Interoperability” to slow down or even grind to a halt. But also within countries, states, provinces, what is likely to happen is a recognition that there is no more time to devote to semantic or organizational interoperability, to government-wide enterprise architectures and global transformational programs.
On the one hand governments will have to slash the cost of their operations (finance management, HR, procurement, general administration) and put some programs on the afterburner (as they contribute less to economic recovery or welfare). On the other hand they will have to focus on reinforcing critical programs and launching new ones (such as bail-outs for entire industrial sectors or new infrastructure investments) of a nature and a scale that are almost unprecedented.
This will lead to consolidating and commoditizing IT related to general administration , wherever feasible, by imposing shared or centralized services: interoperability won’t help much (besides using legacy data), as agencies will need to transition toward common services, applications, infrastructures, as opposed to running their own in an interoperable fashion. Where this is unfeasible or requires too much time, things will be left as they are, just reducing budgets.
Low-priority programs will be left lagging behind, with just the IT support that is required to let them survive, but little or no money for any significant enhancement, let alone major architectural redesign.
Finally, high-priority programs will have very specific interoperability requirements that are likely to break the boundaries of current efforts in the field. They will have to engage resources, information, processes in different industry sectors. For example, how to measure the impact of several dozens or hundreds million dollars? How to prevent misuse of such funds? How to adapt job creation and support measures to the changing landscapes in various sectors and parts of the jurisdiction?
Interoperability will become (or – in a certain sense – remain) a tactical issue, to be faced in conjuction with a specific problem to be solved. There will not be much space left for one-size-fits-all measures, any more enterprise architecture, or religious battles about which flavor of an open standard is open enough.
Interoperability will still play a role to help cushion government agencies from the risk of defaulting IT suppliers responsible for maintaining legacy products. In many cases, these products will be proprietary in nature and hardly interoperable with new products that are candidate for replacement. Therefore, backward compatibility with proprietary data formats will become a key criteria in selecting new, open-standard-compliant alternatives.
In essence, in a long and deep recession the attitude to interoperability will become much more pragmatic. This is an opportunity to show what its true value is, and a challenge for those who still pursue too an ambitious and (sometimes) abstract approach to it.
Category: e-government shared services in government Tags: interoperability, open standards
4 responses so far ↓
1 Philip Allega November 28, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Perhaps public sector is feeling a bit out of sorts? Do good times mean that such things are a luxury one can afford and that lean times throws out valuable chances to FINALLY get it right?
I just left one of the world’s largest company who is investing and supporting these concepts in order to save 15-25% of their ongoing operationa costs over the next 10 years. They felt that now is the perfect time to trump their competition and give their organization the edge when the good times come back. To be fair, they’re a cash rich company that will ride this out; but, governments are also long term.
Knee-jerk reactions that cut out good things in bad times only serve to hamper recovery when the good times arrive with bad things then in place within IT.
Nose? Face? Spite?
Who will help explain that IT investments save money not only in IT but within the government they support? Will anyone stand up?
I see this as a leadership question, rather than a funding or technology issue. Are their leaders with the backbone out there to make this happen? After 10+ years, it’s no surprise that the OECD has raked many governments over the coals for “nice plans” but no governance to nake them a reality. Why no governance? No leadership willing to make it happen.
2 John Kost November 30, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Andrea raises some interesting albeit perhaps an overly optimistic view. Indeed, with crisis, behaviors begin to change. And, while many governments throughout the world appear to be either already having or heading toward severe budget crises, discussions with these leaders prompts me to raise two questions:
1) Are many of these government leaders still in denial? The drop in revenue has been so rapid in some places that it is almost surrealistic. Many politicians often pretend they are ostriches for at least one budget cycle until it becomes apparent that the crisis is real and accounting slight-of-hand won’t solve the problem. Indeed the opportunity exists, but only if the political leadership is willing to do the hard work to bring it to fruition.
2) The technical leaders (usually CIOs) in many jurisdictions still haven’t explained the concept and benefits of interoperability in terms that political leaders understand. Until the politicians truly understand both the business and political benefits, they aren’t going to invest political capital into such an effort. Government IT leaders clearly must embrace a completely different and totally non-technical language for interoperability to move forward.
These are challenging times for many governments. I believe times like these present fantastic opportunities for government CIOs to play a more strategic role because governments desperately need innovation and new approaches to solving old business problems. CIOs that instead spend their time hunkered down trying to figure out how to drives a few cents out of the cost of e-mail are going to blow the opportunity — again.
3 Andrea Di Maio December 1, 2008 at 3:46 am
I do agree with both Phil and John: indeed it is a leadership question. But as John points out, have technical leaders in government made a serious effort in the past to make a clear business case for interoperability? I guess that political leaders can grasp the overall sense of it, but my contention is that most discussions have been rather abstract in nature,.
In my view, the problem is not to “sell” the concept, but to turn from the concept to concrete implementations. The problem is that such an approach implies a departure from a government-wide or even cross-jurisdictional view: different programs may adopt different solutions for semantic or organizational interoperability. If this is the case, so be it! I’d rather have a few programs where interoperability works and delivers value and savings, than a well-constructucted common framework that everybody would subscribe to (in theory) but very few use, or – even worse – many use as an excuse not to act (e.g. let’s wait for the next version of the framework before interoperating).
4 Michiel Malotaux December 1, 2008 at 5:32 am
I agree with Andrea’s thesis: ‘government interoperability may become irrelevant’. Governments are frantically trying to create A2A interoperability and Andrea rightly concludes they have failed in many cases.
The answer lies in taking responsibility for their brief: “services where needed”. Every Government agency is a ‘Civil Servant’, hence serving citizens and businesses and other government agencies. And they will do so by focusing on the services they can provide, and providing these electronically, as a published web service.
A good example are the vehicle and drivers’ licenses registries making their services so easy to obtain that their use is rapidly increasing. In the Netherlands we saw private intermediaries providing a mashup service where the vehicle number returns all vehicle details (including current price) in return.
When publishing and providing web services, semantic differences will become apparent. And when private intermediaries depend on these services for their income, they will rapidly exert pressure for semantic consolidation.
Why don’t Governments learn from successful industries like Google and Amazon, who publish and provide multiple services with easy to use interfaces? If Governments continue to distrust the private sector by doing everything themselves they miss a huge opportunity of doing what they can and should do: providing basic public services securely and 24×7.
There’s a huge and creative potential out there waiting for the availability of electronic public services to provide high value aggregate services to businesses and citizens (and governments).
Gartner’s EIF Update report of June 2007 provides all necessary architecture and information to make this a reality. Why not stress the resolve of the political, organizational and semantic issues identified in this report to make true cross-border public services a reality?