Thursday 14 August 2008

Next steps for e-Government

Several countries have done a lot of work in the past years that result of useful applications for both citizens and companies. Multi-channeling has been adopted, the service oriented architecture explored and possibly web services are already operational.
Most of these efforts are on the technical level. It is still difficult to convince business people of local and national government agencies of the possibilities and the impact on their processes. Technical solutions are not yet translated into business perspectives, which makes it difficult to apply those solutions.

Such a middle out approach, trying to map business issues into existing technical solutions is always difficult. On the other hand, a top down approach seems very time consuming: specifying business issues and needs and supporting them by technical solutions. I am of the opinion that current technology and tooling is getting there. Lacking are integrated tools and techniques that support a top down approach. One is able to specify semantics of business needs and there supporting business processes, but transforming those specifications into technical solutions is still hard labor.


Although a government CIO and other responsible managers can possibly be convinced to standardize business semantics and processes, I think it is still difficult to close the loop. If anyone is aware of integrated tools, approaches, etc., please react.

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