[open-government] OGD in the IT system procurement cycle

Mon Oct 31 14:24:45 GMT 2011

Hi,

On 31.10.2011 15:05, Tracey P. Lauriault wrote:
> That does not mean we should not be moving towards more open formats, 
> and more importantly toward *interoperability*,

Interoperability and government IT systems using data from other gov 
systems is the key to *sustainable* OGD development. I recently made a 
small research and found out that my home city Helsinki uses around 
400-500 IT systems, out of which only a small portion are anyhow 
interconnected.

I got the inspiration to my original post from David Eaves talk in the 
Open Government Data -camp in Warsaw, here is a quote from him: "Our 
goal is to make data platform one that not only citizens outside of 
government can build on, but one that government reconstructs its policy 
apparatus as well as its IT systems at top of. Achieving this will 
ensure that open data gets hardwired right into government and so cannot 
be easily shut down." ( 
http://eaves.ca/2011/10/21/the-state-of-open-data-2011/ )

My hope is that in the future the public sector web sites / portals for 
example would be built *on top of* a robust and open data layer. This 
would mean that the user interface is separated from data and the same 
data interfaces that are used for the portal it self could be offered 
for anybody to access the same data. Two questions:
-> Is this idea good or bad or something in between?
-> If it is good, then how should it be written in the procurement 
documents?

> I want my public service to share data, and it is up to me to work on 
> the conversion, for now, and I think it is reasonable that we ask 
> government to build interoperable systems and at the very least 
> provide services to convert formats, but I do not think it is 
> reasonable to expect all government institutions to toss what they are 
> doing now, and waste the millions spent on enterprise wide systems. 
> But we can ask that those legacy systems become interoperable and that 
> new systems be more open. 

This is a very important point as well, thanks for reminding me about it.
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