Better public services tailored to the needs of the citizen and businesses, require the seamless flow of information across government. The e-government Interoperability Framework (eGIF) set out the government’s technical policies and specifications for achieving interoperability and ICT systems coherence across the public sector. It defined the essential prerequisites for joined-up and web-enabled government; its main thrust was to adopt the Internet and World Wide Web specifications for all government systems. Work has now started to update the standards captured in eGIF and align them to the assets public sector is identifying for reuse.
As part of developing the cross-Government Enterprise Architecture (xGEA), the specification of ICT standards rests with the CTO Council, through its domain teams. CTO Council will only centrally manage standards that are required across a number of organisations and that are not specific to a particular business area (e.g. education, taxation or transport). Accordingly, three types of standard have been identified:
Universal: fundamental standards that are required by all public sector organisations (e.g. XML)
Common: standards used across multiple business domains (e.g. Champions)
Local: where responsibility is federated out to local domains/ businesses/ regions
Domain teams focus only on universal and common standards and liaise with external standards bodies, monitoring their activities to ensure that Government interests are supported and not compromised. Precedence is given to standards with the broadest remit, so appropriate international standards will take preference over EU standards, and EU standards will take preference over UK standards. Standards are primarily driven by the needs of citizen and business-facing services. Priority is being given to standards that serve the requirements of services or processes that are generic across many public sector organisations. Facilitation of new, joined-up services and inter-organisational process developments are also given precedence.
XML is not a standard. XML + a standardized DTD is a standard.
XML is not a cure for all problems. However, a careful, open approach to developing suitable XML DTDs should help to eliminate supplier lock-in and make competitive tendering much easier.
The government should be very active in pushing this agenda, but it must not allow existing large vendors to dominate.
eGIF xGEA ~ coupled with intrinsic recognition programmes and extrinsic recognition programmes
This misses a rather big picture. Huge amounts of goverment data interchange fit a fourth category – external. They need to work with existing open standards or business will face further costs building interfaces between UK government systems and the real world.
Using existing externsl standards means you can use existing external software and knowledge to keep costs down and flexibility up.
The existence of the “Local” standard will provide a way for departments (or individual offices) to create their own systems outside the “Universal” and “Common” domains.
Modern tools allow “systems” to be built locally without reference to anything else. One department in the Foundation Trust where I worked had a system written by the husband of a former employee. The system satisfied their needs, but they did not have source code and had no idea how it worked. It was completely unmaintainable and the IT department did not have the resources to offer a replacement.
To make common systems work, they have to be rigorously enforced at all levels. The cost of moving all the existing small local systems to the new environment will be too big so the existing systems will stay and new ones will be created to work with them.
I’d like to see much greater use of Open Document Standards at all levels of Government. I do not know if Government IT procurement even considers FLOSS options, for example? Transparency and standards should not be considered a drawback, as so often seems the case, it should be the default position.
The government should not even consider the use of standards unless there exists an open-source reference implementation and all parties who were involved in any way in the creation of the standard have irrevocably granted a permanent free license with no restrictions for the use of any of their patents that are necessary for the use of this implementation.
@Jeremy O’Donoghue: “XML is not a standard. XML + a standardized DTD is a standard.”
You’re wrong — XML is a subset of SGML which is an ISO standard (ISO 8879)