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September 30, 2005
Great Audience at Syracuse University
Because of a very active audience, my guest lecture today at the School of Information Studies Syracuse University went very well. I talked about the Danish approach to e-government and enterprise architecture. Denmark has been very successful when it comes to e-government the last couple of years, but our approach (especially to enterprise architecture) is very different form the business-driven American approach, and the students had a lot of good questions.
A particularly interesting discussion concerned the cultural and institutional environment that different governments work in and how that affects our approach to enterprise architecture. Having participated in the international ICA study group last year, I shared some of my experiences with EA initiatives in other countries like Canada, Korea and Sweden. And, as many of the Syracuse students also noted, the cultural and institutional environment in many ways determines the way we do enterprise architecture. E.g. the Danish consensus culture in a multiparty system is very different from the top-down management style necessary in the federal government of America, and I think we must acknowledge that when we build our national architecture programs. All in all, a great day with good input from the Syracuse master students!
Posted by khm at 05:38 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 27, 2005
Meeting Scott Bernard!
Today I met with Dr. Scott Bernard at the School of Information Studies Syracuse University’s Paul Greenberg House here in Washington DC. Scott is the author of the first EA textbook, An Introduction to Enterprise Architecture, he is the editor of the Journal of Enterprise Architecture, and a senior guest lecturer at the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University.
Scott and I talked about his book and the different EA frameworks (e.g. DoDAF and FEAF) used in the American government. Scott had some really good insights and we have scheduled another meeting Friday to discuss my research here in America.
I will also be giving a guest lecture Friday in Scott's EA class about the Danish approach to EA in government – more about that later…
Posted by khm at 02:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 22, 2005
Kick-off Meeting with the FISC Team
I just came back from my first kick-off meeting with the Federal Integration Solutions Centre (FISC – formerly the Government Solutions Centre). The centre is located in McLean, so now I have available office space in Bethesda, on K Street and in McLean.
It was a good meeting where we aligned our expectations for the next four months and set up some milestones for my work with the FISC. The deal is that I will spend one or two days a week with the team to get a thorough understanding of the IBM software portfolio and how that maps to e.g. the Technical Reference Model (TRM) and the solutions that IBM has for the public sector. FISC might be a bit more software focused than my normal interest areas, but the team seems extremely competent in the EA field, so I am sure it will be good for my EA-education!
Posted by khm at 05:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Birthday Party with the EA Experts
Tuesday I celebrated my birthday with my new colleagues at IEG and a couple of my new DC-friends. After only two weeks in Washington DC it was great that so many people showed up – thank you guys!
From an EA perspective the party was also a success. Peter De Meo, who leads the US Federal Public Sector EA practice for IBM, joined the party and my good friend and colleague, Neil Levette from Canada also had a couple of beer with us. We did not talk about enterprise architecture all night(!), but Neil had some great news about Canada’s “Federated Architecture Program”, which Neil also established in 2000. I encourage all EA-nerds to check out the Federated Architecture Program – we can all learn a lot from Canada!
On the picture you see Peter, Neil and me…
Posted by khm at 09:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 18, 2005
Quoted in KIT: Take IT Seriously!
Our study of the municipal merger on the Danish Island of Bornholm is still creating news in Denmark. Many spectators (some more qualified than others) are afraid that the public sector has not learned from the mistakes that were made by the central government and the five municipalities on Bornholm regarding the integration and reorganization of the different information systems and their business processes. By January 2007 all counties and municipalities in Denmark will be reorganized in a large structural reform. More than 1 million employees will be affected, and all public IT systems will have to change. Denmark’s 270 municipalities will be merged into 100 municipalities and everybody is frightened that the potential IT-cost and integration problems will be very expensive.
A couple of months ago I was contacted by a journalist from KIT – a magazine for municipal IT-responsible public servants. I was asked about the political focus on information systems on Bornholm. And my answer was clear: Merging the five municipal’s IT-systems was seen as a technical exercise that could be left to the primary vendor, KMD. Both central officials and politicians and top officials on Bornholm later told us that they had underestimated the importance of the information systems integration as part of the merger. My point in KIT is that this is not the right approach. Politicians and top official in the 100 new municipalities must take the IT-challenge seriously and develop a business driven plan for the future IT-infrastructure. IT must be taken seriously!
Posted by khm at 11:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 15, 2005
"Elevator talk" with Janet Caldow
Yesterday I met with Janet Caldow at the Institute for Electronic Government (IEG). Janet is the founding Director of IEG where she directs a robust research agenda with academic and practitioner partners.
Interestingly, the first thing Janet remembered Denmark for was our aggressive Open Source Software (OSS) strategy. My colleague in the NITA, Dr. John Gøtze visited IEG a couple of years ago, but since then our national strategy has moved more towards open standards with our interoperability framework. Also, I told her about the reported problems with the introduction of advanced OSS in public agencies in DK.
I hope to see Janet some time soon again. She has some great academic contacts and I would like to talk more with her about IEGs work with Harvard University, the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Posted by khm at 08:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
The reality of SOA – based on Web Services
Jochen Schroll recently brought my attention to two very interesting articles from IEEE and HICSS about the performance of web services in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Today, we are all taking about the value of thinking service oriented. SOA is much than a traditional information systems development because it embraces business process modelling and enterprise architecture as well as object-oriented design and distributed systems. But, I believe that it is critical that we also pay attention to some of the technical challenges that comes with the value of using SOA as our pattern for designing distributed systems.
From a strategic business perspective, SOA is built around the notion that services map to business functions. Within computing, the term architecture can refer to lower levels of abstraction, such as a particular computer’s or family of computers’ internal architecture. But SOA generally refers to organizational IS architecture, meaning the unifying or coherent form being used to organize and design the construction, selection and interconnection of an organization’s hardware, software and communications assets. In this way, SOA is an architectural style for building loosely coupled distributed systems that deliver application functionality as services to be used for end-user applications.
Technically the ideas behind SOA build on SOC, a computing paradigm in which services are the fundamental elements for developing applications. In this paradigm ICT products are comprised of references to external components for the performance of various kinds of service. SOC can be used to wrap a service-oriented facade around closed-architecture legacy systems, thereby converting these to be compatible with more open architectures. A SOA framework can take advantage of these wrappers to enable more flexible and cost-effective integration of financial services that continue to use legacy systems, especially in distributed settings.
In many SOA implementations the promotion of well defined, published, and discoverable interfaces is based on web service technology. But what do we know about the performance when we use web services to integrate our IT-infrastructure? Well, according to the IEEE article XML parser, transport protocol, and the overhead of the new proxies in web services affect both the scalability and the latency of the reengineered application. As you might know from reading my blog, I am not a deep technical person. But, having read the two articles (and talked to colleagues about them) I strongly believe that we must consider these technical challenges very carefully before we engage in full blown SOA projects at the national, regional as well as local levels of government. Hopefully, my experiences here in DC with IBM and the federal agencies will shed some practical light on that…
Posted by khm at 02:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 08, 2005
Meeting with Shahid N. Shah
This evening I met with Shahid N. Shah. Shahid is the founder and CEO of Netspective Communications LLC and an expert software engineer, systems architect, and technology evangelist. His focus is more tech than mine – but check out his blog!
Posted by khm at 03:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 06, 2005
Great first day with IBMs Institue for Electronic Government
My first day at IBMs Institue for Electronic Government (IEG) has been great. The kick-off meeting with Jeff Rhoda, the director for global e-government, was very interesting and I think than we got our expectations for the following months aligned very well. In general, people at the institute have been very kind to me and I am sure that we will have a great time together!
Later this week I am meeting with some of the IBM enterprise/IT architecture people that I will be working with in Bethesda. At the IEG I will mainly be sitting in on briefings, so I am looking forward to talking with the EA people about the projects that I will be working on. The objective for my stationing is to gain practical insight into IBMs approach to EA and IT-governance, testing my theoretical foundation in practice, and to collect international data about US experiences with EA and IT-governance.
Posted by khm at 11:08 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 04, 2005
Back in the USA
For the next five months I will be working with IBM in Washington DC. In 1996/97 I was an exchange student in southern Illinois, and I have been looking forward to coming back to the US ever since.
The objective of my stationing with IBM is to gain insight into the practical US experiences with enterprise architecture and strategic information systems planning in government. I will mainly be working with IBMs Institute for Electronic Government, but there will also be time to visit OMB in the White House (responsible for the Federal Enterprise Architecture) and other public agencies during my stay in the EA-capital of the world.
I hope that my stay here will be fruitful for my practical and academic pursuits in the future – I will keep you all posted on my blog!
Posted by khm at 10:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack