Archive for Public Sector

09.06.07

OIM 0.8

Posted in Presentations, Public Sector at 8:33 pm by kkj

Yesterday saw the convergence of no less than 160 people from all over the Danish Public Sector, at the SAS Hotel, Amager, Copenhagen. The Digital Taskforce of the Ministry of Finance called the event to promote the 1.0 (0.8) launch of a common integration model (OIM) for web based public sector information portals. See the previous post on the topic for details.

The day was packed with presentations that outlined goals and solutions of a strategic, and technical nature as well as backgrounders on how the two portals virk.dk and borger.dk are being designed.

My involvement in the project was on the appendices of the OIM that contain the low level guidelines that service providers need in order to get started on publishing content via portals. I gave a presentation on this topic just after lunch, the time of day which in my experience is about the worst time to present: people are full and dazed, and if there’s no coffee (which there wasn’t), it can be quite a challenge to sow any intellectual seeds.

The solution? I don’t think there’s a universal panacea, but I try to keep a loud voice, have interesting as in “less text, more pictures” slides, and maybe crack a joke or tell a story. That tends to help a little … although, truth be told, at the end I did spot two that had their gaze firmly fixed on the inside of their eyelids.

There were no evaluation sheets, but from the discussions I got the impression that people were positively curious. For instance the dreaded, “why is this relevant at all?” question didn’t show, and instead lots of relevant topics were brought up.

A good day, kudos to the Taskforce. Now let’s see this baby in action!

07.03.07

A Common Portal Integration Model

Posted in Public Sector at 8:40 pm by kkj

The Danish Government has launched a large scale initiative to modernize and digitize the Danish Public Sector and is channeling information about the details via the website modernisering.dk. One important goal of this exercise is to increase the level of service provided to citizens, while at the same time reducing the cost of delivering it.

Government Agencies, Ministries, Counties, and Regions, all flock (some more than others) to the Internet to provide self-service to it-literate citizens. Such a flurry of service provider activity is bound to become slightly chaotic lest something be done, so enter the portals: Sundhed.dk for health care services, Borger.dk for citizen services, Virk.dk for company services, and The Danish Nature and Environment Portal for … well you guessed it.

Virk.dk and borger.dk are currently having makeover and will be launching new versions within the not-so-distant future. The remake will focus on bringing new services to citizens and companies thru leverage of the enabling infrastructure that we are so fortunate to have here, including (but not limited to) a national address register of all citizens (CPR), and a national digital certificate initiative (OCES). The vision is to provide two very thin portals whose primary functions are to expose (web based) services from other public entities. In other words, the portals will not implement any business logic, but delegate actual service implementations to other servers, elsewhere.

Many service providers will be exposing services on more than portal. Thus, in order to reduce the cost of implementation and the time to market, it becomes imperative that the portals agree on integration mechanisms …

For the past months I have been working intensely for the Digital Task Force with a few colleagues to provide a common service provider integration model (OIM) for borger.dk and virk.dk. Our efforts were initially restricted by the vision of thin portals, and by a Gartner report, which pointed to 4 different integration technologies: simple linking, embedded frames, web services remote portlets (WSRP), and the Java Portlet Specification (JSR-168). As we dug into it, however, JSR-168 disappeared from the radar because portlets written with this technology will have to be installed into the portal server, hence violating the “thinness” principle (and introducing loads of other issues).

The Digital Taskforce has bravely decided to expose the OIM to the public on a project WIKI - while it is constructed. At the time of writing, however, you will find only the main document for which we’re not responsible, and not the 3 appendices for which we, are as they are currently thru an internal hearing.

On the horizon there will be a public conference on September 5th 2007 where 1.0 of the OIM will be presented. By then, if not sooner, everything should be publicly available.