Sharing eGov Code and Data

August 25th, 2003

Today Phil Windley mentioned an article in Governing about sharing code and data across agencies. It seems like the problem these agencies are finding is that customization of these applications, to make them work in their own environment, is not taking much less time than it would to create the application from scratch.

I think it is up to those defining the direction of enterprise architecture to create policies regarding application development in order to make application sharing easier to implement. Government organizations cannot afford to build applications that are tied to specific backends or that are difficult to customize or integrate.

“What states need to focus on, instead of components, is in the two areas that have shown to promote sharing and re-use: open source software and the Web. I’m no[t] just talking about service orient[ed] architectures and Web services, although those are certainly a part of it. We’d be far ahead to just move toward more effective data sharing.”

– Phil Windley

I agree with Phil that embracing open source software is important to eGov, but wouldn’t it also be great to require that all logic behind future eGov apps must be built so they can be consumed as a web service? I don’t think this would take much more time to do as long as the application was well thought out and then developed correctly.

That is definetely no small undertaking, but in the meantime, developers could, at the very least, use abstraction where ever possible so their code is not tied to a specific data source.

Posted by Brian Sweeting Filed in e-Government

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