Alan Mather’s e-Government @large blog turned one year old the other day. (Late) Happy Birthday, Alan!
Simon Moores’ Thought for Christmas was about the year that was. He writes: “When you go to Mather’s innocuous sounding DiverDiver Blog, you’ll see that he has added links to other blogs written by many of the leading independent thinkers on e-government. Where else would one find that kind of debate, I wonder? So blogging has my vote as one of the more important conceptual developments of 2002.”
I’ve personally been blogging for about two-and-a-half years now, but must say that the past year has been something special. Much thanks to Alan, Simon, and the many other newcomers to blogging. Honourable mention goes to the Utah govbloggers Phil Windley and David Fletcher, who runs two of the best new blogs around. I hope Phil keeps blogging after tomorrow (his last day on the job), and I also hope that David and the others in the Utah govblogroll will continue their blogging in the new year. The Utah govblogroll is IMHO the best thing that has happened in e-government this year. There are a number of worthy contesters to that prize, among them Alan’s blog, but Utah takes the prize.
2002 has been an interesting year in e-government. At least in Denmark, where we have started implementing an e-government strategy for the nation. In January, the National E-government Board said: “The e-government vision is to systematically use digital technologies to introduce new ways of thinking and transform organisations and work processes to improve the quality of service and efficiency” in their Towards e-government – vision and strategy for the public sector in Denmark.
Shamelessly, I will argue that the white paper my group has been working on, and released internally just before we went on holidays, has been the highlight of Danish e-government strategy implementation in 2002. It’ll be a bit into 2003 before the white paper will be published, but the work was done in 2002. I hope that’s not wishfull thinking … I know from friends and collegues around the world that setting dates for white papers is dangerous business. After we in September launched our green paper on these issues, we have probably raised expectations to the white paper. So, let’s see what will be said about it, when people see it. I guess some will be disappointed, but that will be because they don’t understand the context, in which the white paper is no less than a revolution, even if it will be “softened” in the process.
The white paper, which I will ask my boss for money to translate in full, is about what they in North America calls Federal Enterprise Arhcitecture. In Denmark, we talk about a national/government-wide architecture framework for e-government, and have not just copied the American way of doing it. We have looked at their work, even talked with them, and are inspired by them. Perhaps more by Canada than the US, BTW, mainly because our insourced coach Allan Bo Rasmussen from META Group brought in Brian Burke, who were deeply involved in making Canada’s Federated Architecture Program (FAP) a few years ago.
Our white paper basically argues that we need a government-wide (national, regional, and local) architecture framework, which involves three activity areas: 1. Governance framework, “the architecture”, 2. Principles, e.g., Reference Profiles (what UK/NZ/AUS calls e-GIF), and 3. Services, and collaborative such too.
Speaking of services: Come 2003, the service community for geodata will open its services. Gotta check them out, and see if I can make a few web services with them.
