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October 18, 2005
Two Recommendations for Denmark
Last week I was in Denmark to meet with my colleagues in the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, the IT-architect team at IBM, and my PhD supervisor at the IT-University of Copenhagen. The meetings were very productive; I think that my PhD is on the right track, the IBM guys liked my study here in the US, and the meetings in the Ministry were very positive.
Having studied the American (and Canadian) approach to enterprise architecture (EA) the last six weeks, my two preliminary recommendations for Denmark are:
1) Develop a business reference model for all levels of government: The last couple of years Denmark has been doing great in almost any eGov maturity survey. But, the way I see it, the future transformation of the Danish government needs to be facilitated though the use of reference models similar to the approaches taken in Canada and the US. The most important reference model is the business reference model (in Canada it is called the Strategic Reference Model, GSRM). Business reference models are used as a common language to identify opportunities for integration and collaboration across the traditional stove pipes in government. In this way, these models will enable the Danish government to consistently analyse current and future business processes across government, independent of established organizational structures.
2) Use EA to identify redundancies and new business opportunities: Because we have mainly used EA to promote interoperability in Denmark we have focused little on the business case that EA can provide. In my opinion, my employer, the Danish Minsity of Science, Technology and Innovation and the Ministry of Finance needs to work much more seriously with EA in their efforts to reap the benefits of digital government. The Danish government must move from EA concepts and take action by using EA to identify redundancies and new business opportunities.
Posted by khm at 12:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 10, 2005
SOA: Save Our Asses
One of my colleagues recently described Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) implementations very well: “It is about saving our asses”. As you would know from reading my blog and my academic papers, I am a big SOA enthusiast. The problem is that many public agencies see SOA as a silver bullet that will create interoperability, low cost integration of legacy systems and make them agile as never before.
SOA is no silver bullet. We need “traditional” business modelling and enterprise architecture (EA) in any SOA implementation. Here are a couple of SOA/EA basics that I recently send to a public agency:
- SOA ensures the functional integration of a single system (typically via web-services)
- EA defines the overall blueprint – interoperability across the enterprise (identifies the portfolio of available and needed services + SOA guidelines)
- No EA: technical anarchy and chaos
- No SOA: difficult to create interoperability across silos and legacy systems
- Successful IT-organizations blend SOA and EA (bottom-up and top-down)
Posted by khm at 04:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack