May 08, 2005
IS legitimacy, standards and interoperability by John King
As part of the he 11th Annual PhD Summer School in Design and Management of Information Technology I have now finished my preparations for John L. King’s lecture tomorrow. The first part of the lecture will be about the IS discipline. The papers here have been great for my understanding of my own reference community in the IS / eGov field and the use of theory / methodology in the field.
The other part of King’s lecture will be about interoperability and standards. There was only one article in this category by Joel West about seeking compatibility between technical, economic and organizational perspectives when dealing with standards in IS. The paper is only a draft version and I am therefore not able to quote it – BUT, I can say that its an excellent paper!
For me, the session about interoperability will be great. John King is a real expert in the area and he has worked extensively with IT in government. What I hope to discuss during the session tomorrow is:
Does the traditional standards discussion also apply to organizational aspects of typical enterprise architecture (EA) work? Here, I am very interested in the perspectives for standards for organizational interoperability! Can the theories about technical standards be used at the higher levels of EA or do we need new (or other existing) theories to explain the coordination and alignment of business processes and information that span both intra and inter-organizational boundaries?
Can we use EA as the “silver bullet” for enforcing standardization decisions – how is EA integrated with the IS strategy and what does traditional IS concerns like power, centralization and strategic alignment have to add to this discussion?
Are open standards preferable – or is the future based on competing (proprietary) standards where we must “seek rent” for the vendor lock-in that this creates?
How has IS dealt with the coordination of computing or communications activities of a group of firms / public agencies in industries / sectors?
What institutional forms for standard setting organizations should be preferred – standard development organizations, trade or professional associations, industry consortia or virtual organizations (e.g. IETF or W3C) ?
What is happening with the semantic web? Berners-Lee et al. (2002) wanted to supplement the WWW with a semantic web of meaning – but where are we now?
Internal adoption of a specific systems architecture based on standard enables reuse and economics of scale for developed applications, databases and systems integration (Ross, 2004). But, does it mean when we are talking about entire industries / sectors – do the same principles apply or is the picture blurred because of the many stakeholders? What are the perspectives for the future and how can IS be governed in industries / sectors without imposing rigidity and decreasing performance?
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March 14, 2005
Meeting with Bob Sutor
Yesterday, I met with Bob Sutor from IBM. We discussed open standards in the public sector and how they affect the architectures that we build in government over the next couple of years. Bob is the vice president of standards for the IBM Corporation and really knows what he is talking about. For me, his thoughts on interoperability are very interesting and I recommend everybody to read his blog on developerworks.
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