Common information architecture is vital to ensuring that information and data can flow across government to provide seamless, efficient, secure and trusted services. It provides opportunities for the re-use of public data, benefiting the economy and fuelling innovation. The Information Domain of the CTO Council works closely with the Knowledge Council and the Making Public Data Public initiative to ensure that their aims are supported through ICT.
The CTO Council is therefore drawing together a Public Sector Information Architecture covering seven key themes:
- Semantics – the meaning of information
- Syntax – the format of information
- Data Quality – the confidence to re-use information
- Authorisation – the right to use information
- Transport – how to use information
- Authentication – who is using information
- Information Governance – the behaviour and culture to protect and exploit information
This strand will also consider how the public sector will manage its information – for example, will the public sector hold multiple copies of information or will it be held centrally and accessed by many? This has implications for all strands of the ICT strategy, particularly Data Centre rationalisation, G-Cloud and Information Assurance & Security. It also affects decision core to the public sector network as it will define bandwidth requirements and likely volumes of data transfer.
The technical infrastructure and enterprise and information architectures will underpin successful delivery of all elements of the ICT strategy. Provision of common technical standards and designs that are available through the G-Cloud and G-Apps will be a key enabler of efficient reuse of solutions and assets. They ensure interoperability, assure information security and will maximise the opportunity from open source code and open standards.
Erm, this read like a GCSE paper explaining the difference between data and information.
How are they going to do this?
What are they going to represent in this manner.
What are the over-riding architectural principles?
Again, utter drivel.
Incidentally, there is Enterprise and Information Architecture.
Where is Solutions Architecture? Arguably the biggest architectural discipline of the three.
Oh that one, “Who will supply the right tools for you — CTOc
There is nothing here, just a promise to do some work in the future based around a poor definition of information management that could have been lifted out of wikipedia. They clearly have made no decisions on this at all, and have little understanding of the concepts involved. On the strength of this you have to wonder if the government actually employs any information architects?
How does ‘Transport’ define how to use the data, where is a section on visualisation and insight – a hot topic in the Business Intelligence world at the moment i.e. now i have all this data how do i make sense of it. See various ads from CapGemini and IBM
I also strongly beleive that the government should be investing money into creating a web 2.0 platform around information management to allow collaboration in how data is being used and could be used. This could eventually be extended out to the public to suggest ways in which insight could be gained from all the data and information the government will hold.