Just finished another ICT-related technical assistance visit with a developing country government. Even in mid-2014, I spend a large amount of time teaching basic principles of enterprise architecture, and the need for adding form and structure to ICT strategies.
Service-oriented architectures (SOA) have been around for quite a long time, with some references going back to the 1980s. ITIL, COBIT, TOGAF, and other ICT standards or recommendations have been around for quite a long time as well, with training and certifications part of nearly every professional development program.
So why is the idea of architecting ICT infrastructure still an abstract to so many in government and even private industry? It cannot be the lack of training opportunities, or publicly available reference materials. It cannot be the lack of technology, or the lack of consultants readily willing to assist in deploying EA, SOA, or interoperability within any organization or industry cluster.
During the past two years we have run several Interoperability Readiness Assessments within governments. The assessment initially takes the form of a survey, and is distributed to a sample of 100 or more participants, with positions ranging from administrative task-based workers, to Cxx or senior leaders within ministries and government agencies.
Questions range from basic ICT knowledge to data sharing, security, and decision support systems.
While the idea of information silos is well-documented and understood, it is still quite surprising to see “siloed” attitudes are still prevalent in modern organizations. Take the following question:
This question did not refer to sharing data outside of the government, but rather within the government. It indicates a high lack of trust when interacting with other government agencies, which will of course prevent any chance of developing a SOA or facilitating information sharing among other agencies. The end result is a lower level of both integrity and value in national decision support capability.
The Impact of Technology and Standardization
Most governments are considering or implementing data center consolidation initiatives. There are several good reasons for this, including:
- Cost of real estate, power, staffing, maintenance, and support systems
- Transition from CAPEX-based ICT infrastructure to OPEX-based
- Potential for virtualization of server and storage resources
- Standardized cloud computing resources
While all those justifications for data center consolidation are valid, the value potentially pales in comparison of the potential of more intelligent use of data across organizations, and even externally to outside agencies. To get to this point, one senior government official stated:
“Government staff are not necessarily the most technically proficient. This results in reliance on vendors for support, thought leadership, and in some cases contractual commitments. Formal project management training and certification are typically not part of the capacity building of government employees.
Scientific approaches to project management, especially ones that lend themselves to institutionalization and adoption across different agencies will ensure a more time-bound and intelligent implementation of projects. Subsequently, overall knowledge and technical capabilities are low in government departments and agencies, and when employees do gain technical proficiency they will leave to join private industry.”
There is also an issue with a variety of international organizations going into developing countries or developing economies, and offering no or low cost single-use ICT infrastructure, such as for health-related agencies, which are not compatible with any other government owned or operated applications or data sets.
And of course the more this occurs, the more difficult it is for government organizations to enable interoperability or data sharing, and thus the idea of an architecture or data sharing become either impossible or extremely difficult to implement or accomplish.
The Road to EA, SOAs, and Decision Support
There are several actions to take on the road to meeting our ICT objectives.
- Include EA, service delivery (ITIL), governance (COBIT), and SOA training in all university and professional ICT education programs. It is not all about writing code or configuring switches, we need to ensure a holistic understanding of ICT value in all ICT education, producing a higher level of qualified graduates entering the work force.
- Ensure government and private organizations develop or adopt standards or regulations which drive enterprise architecture, information exchange models, and SOAs as a basic requirement of ICT planning and operations.
- Ensure executive awareness and support, preferably through a formal position such as the Chief Information Officer (CIO). Principles developed and published via the CIO must be adopted and governed by all organizations,
- Nobody expects large organizations, in particular government organizations, to change their cultures of information independence overnight. This is a long term evolution as the world continues to better understand the value and extent of value within existing data sets, and begin creating new categories of data. Big data, data analytics, and exploitation of both structured and unstructured data will empower those who are prepared, and leave those who are not prepared far behind.
- For a government, not having the ability to access, identify, share, analyze, and address data created across agencies will inhibit effective decision support, with potential impact on disaster response, security, economic growth, and overall national quality of life.
- If there is a call to action in this message, it is for governments to take a close look at how their national ICT policies, strategies, human capacity, and operations are meeting national objectives. Prioritizing use of EA and supporting frameworks or standards will provide better guidance across government, and all steps taken within the framework will add value to the overall ICT capability.
Pacific-Tier Communications LLC provides consulting to governments and commercial organizations on topics related to data center consolidation, enterprise architecture, risk management, and cloud computing.
