Towards an Open Architecture for the Public Sector

#diggovreview #publicsectorIT .

Attended an interesting workshop last week to discuss some of the architectural aspects of Digital Government, hosted by Skyscape. One purpose of this discussion was to feed into the Labour Party Digital Government Review, and possibly into the Labour manifesto for the next election. Under modified Chatham House rules, I believe I am permitted to blog about the workshop as long as I don't attribute anything to anybody or any organization.


There are several architectural themes that are probably shared between the political parties, although there may be some differences of emphasis and interpretation. For example, everyone seems to pay lip service to the idea of opening up public sector IT, and reducing the power of the incompetent and self-interested, whoever these may be. But there will undoubtedly be different views on the right tactics for redistributing commercial and bureaucratic power.

Openness leads to fashionable ideas about IT acquisition - a preference for consuming rather than self-build, and a preference for agile development rather than waterfall. These are great ideas when used properly, but we must be careful not to encourage the illusion that these ideas provide a magic solution to the troubles of public sector IT. Indeed, some recent IT disasters have been attributed to an ill-considered rush to "Agile". And the Buy-Not-Build agenda must be governed properly, to avoid ceding too much architectural control to the large platform providers.

Openness also means structural change. For example, a shift from vertical integration and vertical silos to lateral modularity and co-creation, which my friend and associate Philip Boxer calls Collaborative Composition. This connects with the notions of Shared Services and Platform.

Finally, there is the question of the tempo of change. Government policies have a fairly rapid cycle time - in some cases around 18-24 months depending on department - but we cannot afford to reengineer systems and services, let alone platforms, at this sort of frequency.

So there was considerable discussion about the role of Government in providing a platform, and whether the platform should be a Minimum Viable Platform (similar to the Internet) or provide added value. There was also some debate as to whether politicians could be persuaded to support systems and platforms that would last longer than the policies that they were intended to implement.

The Public Sector suffers, perhaps even more than other organizations, from a confusion between Requirement and Solution. So people like to talk about Open Standards or Agile as the solution to high IT costs, or advocate Big Central Database as the perfect solution to any information needs, instead of talking about the requirements, such as interoperability and low switching costs. I hope that the Labour Party (or any other party for that matter) can be encouraged to express its policies in terms of the requirements and governance approach, rather than mandating specific technological solutions.

As I've pointed out before, the term "Joined-Up Government" has several different interpretations. From an Inside-Out (supply-side) perspective, it is commonly taken to imply improved integration between separate government departments and agencies - in other words, some kind of reorganization, not merely of IT systems and services but also the agencies responsible for these services. Of course, reorganization might sometimes be needed, but this is merely one possible solution to the real requirement, which in my opinion comes from the Outside-In (demand-side) perspective - the citizen's need for a coherent experience of government services.

For example, the much-discussed integration between Healthcare and Social Care doesn't entail merging two massive and inefficient silos into one even more massive and inefficient silo, but could be achieved simply by opening up the silos and improving the flows of information between them. The Outside-In perspective merely calls for the citizen to get a coherent joined-up service across both healthcare and social care, however this may be done.

And consider the much maligned Contact Point, which had somehow morphed from an information sharing platform ("System of Engagement") to a Big Central Database ("System of Record"), largely under the control of people who didn't appreciate that these weren't necessarily the same thing.

Effective multi-agency working depends on effective information sharing, but this doesn't mean putting all the data into a single source of truth. Many of the breakthroughs of Digital Government have come, not from building massive central databases, but from improving collaboration between different agencies – health, social care, police, justice, etc – often dealing with the same problem families from different professional perspectives. 

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Some of us have been talking about these themes for a long time. In my own small way, I have written a number of articles and blogposts about eGovernment and Joined-Up Government, and I submitted something on Shared Services to the Cabinet Office in January 2006, most of which is probably still valid. See previous posts on this blog - eGovernment, Joined-Up, Shared Services.

Philip Boxer, Creating Value in Ecosystems (December 2010)

Jerry Fishenden and Mark Thompson, Digital Government, Open Architecture, and Innovation: Why Public Sector IT Will Never Be the Same Again (Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory September 2012)

Mike Martin, Open Architecture Critique - A Draft (March 2014)

David Sprott and Richard Veryard, Shared Services for the UK Public Sector (Submission to the Cabinet Office, CBDI Forum January 2006)

Richard Veryard, Joined-Up Services (Review of the Public Management and Policy Association. February 2002)

Richard Veryard and Philip Boxer, Public Sector IT - The CSA Case (December 2004)

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See also David Sprott's response to this post. Open Architecture for the Public Sector (May 2014)

What's Wrong with Universal Credit? On The Rooting of the Particular in the Universal

According to Hegel, the administration of a corporation's affairs by its own supervisors will often be inept, "for although they know and have before them their own distinct interests and affairs, they have a less complete grasp of the connection between these and more remote conditions and universal points of view". (GWF Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 1820)

Therefore, one of the challenges for enterprise architecture is to maintain a pragmatic balance between the particular and the universal, especially when many of the decision-makers (as Hegel observed) tend to see things from a narrow short-term perspective.

So at first sight, we might think that the UK Government initiative known as Universal Credit represents a welcome exception to this narrow short-term thinking. What a brilliant idea to consolidate all benefit systems into a single simpler system!

The devil, of course, is in the detail. Mark Ballard explains:

Universal Credit would not only re-engineer the complex administration of £70bn social security payments to 8m households, merging six benefits systems across two government departments and local authorities throughout the country. It would also rely on councils up and down the country making their own systems and processes compatible. It would depend upon HM Revenue & Customs completing its own income tax system reforms of unprecedented ambition, Real-Time Information. And HMRC would in turn depend on employers, banks and payroll software suppliers reforming their computer systems and processes as well. Universal Credit would have to navigate this exponentially explosive collection of risk factors. This was a spaghetti junction of high-stakes computer gambits from which Universal Credit would have to pull a benefits payment that was reliable and secure. (Mark Ballard, Universal Credit failures put coalition ICT strategy in purdah. Computer Weekly September 2013)

What went wrong? Agile Development? Procurement? Interdepartmental warfare? Bureaucracy?

"There was an extremely strong command and control culture at the DWP, which goes against agile. We were trying to alleviate that - but it wasn't working," said a source. "The fundamental problem was procurement," said an anonymous participant. "Our hands were tied because of procurement. If you don't set up the contract properly, you are on a hiding to nothing." (Mark Ballard, Why agile development failed for Universal Credit, Computer Weekly July 2013)

Iain Duncan Smith is stuck between using traditional waterfall and systems integration, advocated by DWP, and "agile hacking", advocated by GDS.  (Bryan Glick, The question that matters on Universal Credit: Do you believe Iain Duncan Smith? Computer Weekly Feb 2014, comment by John Alexander)

Any system which is designed to operate with a smaller bureaucracy will be opposed tooth and nail by the bureaucrats mandated to implement it. (Benedict Brogan, Whitehall is shuddering over Universal Credit problems Telegraph February 2014, comment by Littlegrayman)

And was it just poor execution, or was the vision faulty? Paul Spicker thinks the whole project was doomed.

It is easy to blame the IT when things go wrong, but when people are asked to do impossible things, it should not be surprising if they do not deliver. ... The most basic flaw rests in the idea that we can “personalise” benefits for millions of people. There are just too many moving parts; and in a system with millions of iterations, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. (Paul Spicker, Universal Credit: Don’t blame the IT Computer Weekly Feb 2014)

(I want to make two observations here. Firstly, requirements are not additive. Even if each requirement makes sense on its own, that doesn't mean that the whole set of requirements makes sense. And secondly, requirements that make sense in some contexts don't make sense in other contexts. For example, retail may be able to achieve a good level of personalization, because it doesn't matter much if a customer sometimes gets the "wrong" promotional voucher. But it matters a lot if people get the "wrong" benefits, so the stakes are much higher.)


And even the Spectator (a right-wing weekly magazine) complains about ministerial incompetence and inflexibility.

The Universal Credit fiasco exemplifies Duncan Smith’s narcissistic failure to admit and remedy mistakes. As Computer Weekly — a far better guardian of the taxpayer than the Conservative backbenches or press, incidentally – has said, Duncan Smith proceeded with a vast and complicated IT project without learning the lessons from the IT disasters of the Labour years. (Nick Cohen, The conservative case against Iain Duncan Smith, Spectator June 2014)

John Naughton compares Universal Credit with Obamacare, and detects the same problem with both.

How is it that governments stuffed with able and conscientious civil servants screw up so spectacularly whenever IT is involved? ... The strange thing about this is that you wouldn't need to have been a geek to spot the problem with healthcare.gov. You just had to think architecturally about it. Yet apparently nobody in the administration did. The same applies to the post-9/11 decision to link all the previously separate US security databases into one giant file to which at least 250,000 people had access, one of whom happened to be Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning. (John Naughton, Obamacare, universal credit… why do governments make such a mess of IT? Observer December 2013)

You don't have to be a geek. You just have to think architecturally. And thinking architecturally means - among other things - anticipating and resolving the kind of problems faced by projects like these.

Standing up for the universal point of view doesn't justify a Stalinist approach to smoothing out the unavoidable complexities of dealing with real individuals and their messy lives. Is this a failure for IT, or a failure for bureaucracy? And can we tell the difference?


Updated 3 July 2014

A Twin-Track Approach to Government IT

#ukgovit @instituteforgov has just published a report called System Error: Fixing the Flaws in Government IT.

The report recommends a twin-track approach to government IT, based on the two concepts of Agile and Platform.

"The platform must standardise and simplify core elements of government IT. For any elements of IT outside the platform, new opportunities should be explored using agile principles. These twin approaches should be mutually reinforcing: the platform frees up resource to focus on new opportunities while successful agile innovations are rapidly scaled up when incorporated into the platform."

The report acknowledges the tension between these two concepts ...

"Treating items as commodities reduces cost but can limit flexibility; coordinating elements of IT across departments frees up resources but may move them further from frontline users; common standards support interoperability but also restrict the freedoms to innovate."

... and offers some general ideas for managing this tension.

• To act fully in the interests of government, an agile approach requires a light touch form of coordination at a system level. 

• To minimise duplication of effort in solving the same problems, there needs to be system-wide transparency of agile initiatives. 

• Existing elements of the platform also need periodic challenge. ... Transparency, publishing feedback and the results of experiments openly, will help to keep the pressure on the platform for continual improvement as well as short-term cost savings.

Trouble is, some of this stuff is really hard. The report talks glibly about "a less than intelligent customer", referring first to business users having an inadequate conception of the possible, and then to the public sector as a whole lacking the collective knowledge and skills to negotiate effectively with suppliers. This lack of intelligence is apparently blamed on the V-model development process, which creates the impression that the adoption of Agile methods would solve this problem. But the idea of Agile as a silver bullet is a dangerous one, as many people have already pointed out on the Linked-In discussion group.

One way of understanding the twin track approach is to think of the different kinds of economics involved.

• 'Platform' means delivering economies of scale and economics of scope.
• 'Agile' means delivering economies of alignment.

Combining the two introduces some complex architectural challenges, as I've written about here and elsewhere before. We call this Asymmetric Design. For an example of this approach applied to public sector IT, see an analysis of the CSA Case by Philip Boxer and myself. See also The Impact of Governance Approaches on SoS Environments (pdf) by Philip Boxer and others.


In the current economic situation, the public sector as a whole is charged with making massive cost savings, and it is crazy to imagine that cost savings of this scale would not be associated with significant structural change, including IT systems. This kind of disruptive innovation goes way beyond the economies of scale and scope, and introduces some serious questions about the economics of alignment.

The word "architecture" is mentioned a few times in the Institute for Government report, but only in passing as something that the Government CIO will look after. (Mostly technology or solution architecture, I only found one single reference to business architecture.) So there is an implicit idea of central thinking and hierarchical governance. But there are some architectural challenges here that are some way beyond the current practices of enterprise architecture.

Governance is also a significant problem. The report comments on the pendulum swings between centralized and decentralized provision, which is something we noted in the CSA case, and was also present in the case of ContactPoint (which we were in the middle of writing up when it was cancelled). Such pendulum swings are often a characteristic symptom of weak or unsustained governance.

Not only is this stuff structurally complicated, but there are some commercial stakeholders that have every incentive to maintain the complicated status quo, thanks to a grossly dysfunctional procurement process.

And there is an even bigger problem with the report, which is that it looks at government IT exclusively from within government - in other words, from the perspective of civil servants. For example, the report adopts a supply-side notion of "joined-up government", understood largely in terms of internal linkages and efficiencies between systems, and fails to mention the demand-side notion of "joined-up government" that involves a coherent experience for the citizen. (See my post on Joined-Up Government from December 2005.)

Meanwhile the notion of "user" appears to refer mainly to civil servants and other public sector workers. Surely the purpose of government IT is not to provide direct value to civil servants but to provide various forms of indirect value to individual citizens and socioeconomic communities.

The report regrets that "government IT [is] falling further and further behind the fast-paced and exciting technological environment that citizens interact with daily" and indicates "the potential for IT ... fundamentally changing the relationship between citizen and state". "Around the world governments are using technology to help them deliver better services, be more transparent and accountable, and connect more directly with their citizens." (Examples are cited from Canada, USA and Malaysia.)

And yet the report fails to explain how "agile" can adequately represent the demand side requirements of citizens, interacting with a broad range of government services while going about their public business. There is a completely different notion of "platform" required here - government as a platform, which Tim O'Reilly and others have been talking about for a couple of years. And a different notion of agility, which goes a lot further than agile software development.

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Other commentary

See Linked-In discussion group

Harry Metcalfe (2 March 2011) observed that many of the recommendations in the report were really hard, and was one of the first to complain about the insufficient attention to procurement in the report.

Shared Services for the UK Public Sector 2

@tonyrcollins asks if the UK government is having trouble closing down ID Cards and ContactPoint, what chance 25% across-the-board savings? (Computer Weekly, June 23, 2010)

Tony refers to the latest "Structural Reform Plan" (pdf) from the Cabinet Office, apparently produced in Powerpoint. I have picked out four bullet points that are particularly relevant to the topic of shared services, and these four interact in potentially challenging ways.

3. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Strategy - Reduce the cost structure of ICT in central government, while supporting technologies which increase citizen involvement, and our agendas of transparency and localisation

3.1 Increase powers of CIO to drive the integration and improve value for money of ICT infrastructure; Set up infrastructure for new CIO office and increase central CIO powers; Start the roll out cross-departmental asset register on a common ICT infrastructure.

3.4 i Support Department for Education and Home Office in decommissioning / reshaping Contact Point and ID Cards

3.5 iii Establish IT skunk works team to assess and develop faster ways of developing ICT

4. Driving efficiency in Government Operations - Improve the efficiency of government operations by driving central management of core functions, including property, communications, procurement and project management

4.8 Simplify and take costs out of services; Support departments to simplify services; Support departments to reduce costs of transactional services including putting more services online

There are several conflicting agendas implied here.

• Centralization versus simplification versus automation as rival approaches to cost-saving.
• Localization versus central management.
• Top-down initiative and central CIO powers versus skunk works. (It is difficult to see how a project driven and funded from a Cabinet Office plan can possibly count as skunk works.)

With particular reference to ContactPoint, surely the original business case for ContactPoint was to create a common ICT infrastructure (3.1) that would simplify and take costs out of services (4.8). Even if the original estimated benefits are now thought to be unrealistically high, it would be equally unrealistic to imagine that the benefits would have been zero. So the Cabinet Office is backing away from a commitment to decommissioning ContactPoint, and is now talking about  "reshaping". This "reshaping" is essentially an architectural problem, and a complicated and intriguing one, since those responsible must presumably find a way of preserving or enhancing the value-adding aspects of the scheme while eliminating those aspects that were politically controversial or technically expensive. I am currently writing a paper that will outline a possible architectural approach.

Tony asks what chance of achieving 25% cost savings. The PowerPoint version of the Cabinet Office plan doesn't have these figures. I look forward to the Cabinet Office releasing the Excel version of the plan.

Shared Services for the UK Public Sector

The incoming government has already announced that a number of high-profile shared service initiatives will be scrapped, including BECTA and ContactPoint. While some of these initiatives have been overshadowed by privacy concerns, their abolition is seen as a cost-saving measure, thus indicating a lack of belief in the cost-saving arguments previously put forward for these initiatives.

The termination of ContactPoint will introduce migration problems for local authorities that have already migrated their systems and procedures onto the ContactPoint database, and will now need to procure some viable alternative. (What should follow ContactPoint? CYP May 2010)

At the same time, however, new shared services are being proposed. For example, I note a report commissioned for the Welsh government, suggesting that collaborative working and shared services could make savings on its education budget [Kable, 19 May 2010]. And Westminster wants to share social care software [Kable, 25 May 2010].

The whole area of shared services remains controversial. John Seddon of Vanguard, a notable critic of shared services, has been voluble in his criticism of the assumption that shared service designs will automatically lead to economies of scale and therefore lower transaction costs. Here are a couple of his pieces.

• Open Letter to David Miliband (May 2006, registration required)
• Speech against the motion 'Shared services will deliver the greatest efficiency' (Institute of Revenues, Ratings and Valuation annual conference, October 11th 2006)
• Why I'm suspicious of shared services (Local Government Chronicle, January 2010)

I agree with Seddon that the business case for shared services often looks simplistic if not naive, and there appear to be some serious architectural flaws in the way that some of these initiatives have been conceived.

However, I remain convinced that shared services can have a place in the public sector IT strategy, provided that the architectural complexities can be sorted out, and with radical changes to the procurement regime. But there are some critical asymmetries here that have to be managed, and I don't see much sign that the key players fully understand this complexity yet.

And simply abandoning shared services doesn't solve the problem either.

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In December 2004, @PhilBoxer and I wrote an analysis of the Child Support Agency from the perspective of asymmetric design. Public Sector IT - The CSA Case

In January 2006, @davidsprott and I, on behalf of the CBDI Forum, submitted a brief response to the UK government's published strategy on transformational government. Shared Services for the UK Public Sector (pdf). Our response identified the need for architecture, but we didn't spell out what this entailed.

Business Value from SOA - Transparent and Connected Democracy

US President-elect Obama has published a technology agenda for his administration. It includes a number of items where Service-Oriented Architecture could make a key contribution.

• Open Up Government to its Citizens: ... An Obama presidency will use cutting-edge technologies to [create] a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America's citizens.

• Bring Government into the 21st Century: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will use technology to reform government and improve the exchange of information between the federal government and citizens while ensuring the security of our networks. ... The nation's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) [will] ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices.

• Lower Health Care Costs by Investing in Electronic Information Technology Systems: ... move the U.S. health care system to broad adoption of standards-based electronic health information systems, including electronic health records.

• Modernize Public Safety Networks: ... Obama and Biden will implement policies to spur the development and deployment of new technologies to promote interoperability, broadband access, and more effective communications among first responders and emergency response systems.

This agenda touches on a number of the key themes of this blog: citizen-centric services, cost reduction, inter-agency working, interoperability, security. Expect to hear a lot more on these themes in the New Year.

Public Sector SOA

The UK Government has identified four primary opportunities for using SOA in eGovernment:

• Syndication
• Rule Engine
• Joining up internal architecture
• Hand-shaking between agencies

For each of these opportunities, I shall quote a brief description from the GovTalk website, and then add some commmentary of my own.

Syndication

"This is where the services of a single Agency are to be aggregated with that of others and delivered by a third-party. This approach is supported by the introduction of common vocabularies and category lists such as the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV). A potential example would be DirectGov."

This is essentially a call for public-private mashups - in other words, joined-up services. There are some interesting opportunities for voluntary agencies and community groups to create customized "added value" services for particular target groups. This kind of thing can help to extend the reach of government services into otherwise disadvantaged groups, and thereby supports an "inclusivity" agenda.

This can also support an agenda of autonomy and decentralization, including alternative notions of identity (e.g. Identity 2.o).

Rules Engine

"Where a number of Agencies are dependant upon the rules set by another agency, and where those rules are complex and likely to change. A Web Services ‘call’ can be embedded into an application to perform calculations and return results into local data."

Among other things, this supports an agenda of "joined-up policy making", because it helps with the coordination, monitoring and maintenance of a broad range of policies across a broad portfolio of government systems and services. Ideally, government should be working towards closed-loop policy management, in which (i) policies can be directly associated with the sum of their outcomes, using service-oriented business intelligence and analytics, and (ii) policies can be adjusted in a coordinated manner to improve outcomes.

Joining Up Internal Architecture

"Where an Agency operates enterprise technologies, such as Workflow, Records Management, Middleware, Content Management. This approach avoids embedding API(s) from one component into another. The potential to create Web Services wrappers around proprietary technologies leads to the ‘swapability’ promoted by the e-GIF."

In other words, joined-up infrastructure. At the infrastructure level government requirements are pretty similar to those of any other large organization, except that governments often put greater emphasis on open standards, multi-vendor support and interoperability.

Handshaking with other Agencies

"Where an Agency wishes to interact with another Agency (G2G). This may be in terms of: Creating Workflow Instances, Making Appointments, Shared CRM facilities. Access to Data."

Finally we come to joined up business processes - orchestration and workflow, choreography and collaboration. This is perhaps the most obvious type of joined-up government, but not (as we have seen above) the only type.

So who does the joined-up thinking? Apparently, the joining-up initiative isn't imposed by any centralized planning body, but merely stems from "an agency wishing to interact with another agency". (So no arm-twisting from the Prime Minister then?)

Final remarks

Joined-up government is not just about joined-up processes - it also includes joined-up services, joined-up policy and joined-up platforms. There are some interesting initiatives underway in the UK government, and I look forward to seeing some practical results soon.

Sources

UK GovTalk e-GIF FAQ

[update] For a description of current initiatives in Canada, see John Gøtze: Aligning the Ducks.

Information Sharing and Joined-Up Services 2

My colleague David Sprott has just posted a critique (Big Brother Database Dinosaur) of the latest UK Government proposals [Note 1] for putting citizen data into a large central database.

As many commentators have pointed out [Note 2], a large central database of this kind would have to be built to extremely high standards of data quality and data protection. Given the recent history of public sector IT, it is hard to be confident that such standards would be achieved or maintained. There is also the question of liability and possible compensation - for example if a citizen suffered financial or other loss as a result of incorrect data.

But in any case, as David points out from an SOA perspective, the proposal is architecturally unsound and technologically obsolescent. Robin Wilton (Sun Microsystems) comes to a similar conclusion from the perspective of federated identity.

Government ministers are busily backtracking on the "Big Brother" elements of the proposal [Note 3], but the policy paper confirms some of the details [Note 4].

David's comments refer mainly to the proposed consolidation of citizen information across various public sector agencies within the UK. But there is another information-sharing problem in the news at present - the fact that the UK criminal records database does not include tens of thousands of crimes committed by UK citizens in other countries. [Note 5]

Part of the difficulty seems to be in verifying the identity of these records. Information sharing requires some level of interoperability, and this includes minimum standards of identification. There are some serious issues here, including semantics, which can never be resolved merely by collecting large amounts of data into one place.

The problem of information sharing within one country is really no different from the problems of information sharing between countries. But at least in the latter case there is nobody saying we can solve all the problems by building a single international database. At least I hope not.

As I said on this blog in 2003 [Note 6], we need to innovate new mechanisms to manage information sharing. This is one of the opportunities and challenges for SOA in delivering joined-up services in a proper manner. Then centralization becomes irrelevant.

Note 1: BBC News January 14th 2007

Note 2: Fish & Chip Papers: Government uber-databases,

Note 3: BBC News January 15th 2007. See also Fish & Chip Papers: Data sharing does not a Big Brother make.

Note 4: Daily Telegraph Microchips for mentally ill planned in shake-up.

Note 5: According to ACPO, some 27,500 case files were left in desk files at the Home Office instead of being properly examined and entered into the criminal records database. [BBC News]

Note 6: See my post from 2003 on Information Sharing and Joined-Up Services.

Joined-Up Government

Robin Wilton collected these trophies of Joined-Up Government at an e-Government conference in Manchester.

Robin Wilton's New Friends

I've been meaning to blog about Joined-Up Government (J-U-G) for a while now, and this just gives me a final nudge.

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There have always been several different notions of J-U-G in play (as I have written before). I think it's particularly interesting to distinguish between an internal (service-provider) perspective and an external (citizen, service-consumer) perspective.

Internal Perspective

Governments can use SOA to connect within or between large departmental silos. There are enormous potential benefits in efficiency and effectiveness, which indirectly benefit the citizen.



But internal joining-up is only half the story ...

External Perspective

... and this is an example of what joined-up government looks like from the citizen's perspective.



Applying for a student place and applying for a loan are part of the same process. If government doesn't allow the citizen to synchronize these steps, then the citizen is forced to bear extra risk.

Joined-up government is then a way of improving service and reducing risk from the citizen's perspective as well as from the government's own perspective.

My CBDI Journal article on this topic is in the pipeline. Meanwhile, you may wish to look at an earlier article of mine on Joined-Up Services (2002).

Technorati Tags: government joined-up SOA service-oriented

Justice

The so-called Global Advisory Committee of the US Department of Justice mandates SOA in its new strategic plan (pdf).

Paul Wormeli of PEC Solutions Inc (slogan: "Web-Enabling Government") describes this move as a disruptive technology, a paradigm shift, a giant leap.

Some useful background to the DOJ decision can be found in discussion minutes for Nov 10, 2003 (pdf), which includes brief comment about related SOA work.

Accelerated Information Sharing for Law Enforcement (AISLE)	AISLE supports mission-critical public safety operations, and it automates current transactions. AISLE utilizes Web services, not just XML, and it is thought to be a good example of SOA.
Southwest Alabama Law Enforcement Tactical System (LETS)	An Internet-based information delivery system designed for Alabama's law enforcement community, which successfully solved the data integration problem across 22 different data systems to deliver driver's license photos and integrate arrest records with court records through the use of Web services and SOA.
Workforce Connections	Next-generation authoring and content delivery. The objective of Workforce Connections is to collaborate with experts to identify and demonstrate innovative approaches for the twenty-first century workplace. It provides a self-service approach, where content experts directly manage their own data and where development occurs directly in the content environment online. In addition, multiple developers can collaborate online simultaneously.

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Related Material

Microsoft on Integrated Justice

Systems Integration Through Middleware, by Steve Prisoc

SOA for IJIS (ppt), by Jeff Langford of Secure Justice

Judith Meskill relays a press release by Delegata about an SOA project for the DOJ.