OpenSource Connections
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Last week I attended a breakfast hosted by the Greater Richmond Technology Council, where I had the opportunity to hear Peggy Feldman discuss the Commonwealth of Virginias plans for a more Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Ms Feldman is the Commonwealths Chief Applications Officer.
Ms Feldman pointed out a number of challenges facing the Commonwealths IT departments in coming years. 40% of the states workforce could retire in 5 years, budget projections look flat, financial and HR systems are 30 years old, and they need efficiencies. Current interactions with citizens rely too much on paper, and she pointed out that many state agencies websites provide nothing more than a download form to print out and mail in. There are nearly 2000 applications across all the state agencies, and at least 20 different types of architectures.
The CAO runs VEAP, the Virginia Enterprise Applications Program, and Ms Feldman pointed out that this is the only agency in a position to push multiagency and collaborative solutions. The CAO does not want to force all state agencies to adopt a particular platform, but she does want to find ways for the Commonwealth to find technology efficiencies without a lot of upfront software costs.
In the long term, she wants to see state agenices providing more self-service applications to citizens, to have agencies share more data using XML, and to reduce those 20 some architectures to a smaller pool of 3 or 4.
Because the state agencies are very decentralized, data standards and management is a huge challenge. What the CAO wants is to put an enterprise level layer on top of existing systems, and she sees this as based on SOA principles.
So why go the SOA route, and how does this help the Commonwealth? I think the CAOs strategy is a good one that lends itself to a gradual transformation of the states IT infrastructure and a relatively efficient use of resources (both internal agency IT staff and external contractors).
Thomas Erls book “SOA: Principles of Service Design” lists the following benefits of an SOA infrastructure:*
- Increased Intrinsic Interoperability
- Increased Federation
- Increased Vendor Diversification Options
- Increased Business and Technology Domain Alignment
- Increased ROI
- Increased Organizational Agility
- Reduced IT Burden
I think the Commonwealth will benefit from all of these advantages of SOA, but perhaps on top of Ms Feldmans mind is the Increased Intrinsic Interoperability.
This week I had the pleasure of attending my first board meeting of the Virginia Technology Association, which I was recently appointed to by virtue of my work on the board of the Charlottesville Business Innovation Council. After the VTA board meeting at the Library of Virginia, the VTA and the GRTC hosted their annual legislative reception at the same location. It was a great reception with a number of interesting contacts, but it also gave me an opportunity to speak with Ms Feldman a little more one on one.
Ms Feldman told me that there are many types of data that are common between state agencies, and that this information could be shared better. Specifically she pointed out the possible use of HR-XML as an XML standard for personal information about citizens that all agencies use. Thats an example of the Intrinsic Interoperability that SOA offers.
She told me that most of the next year will be spent developing standards, before individual agencies in 2010 may start to publish RFPs for work, but that the various tax agencies, the DMV, and social services are likely candidates for some of the initial work.
Based on my own recent experiences for both my own business and CBIC, I can say that its a real pain to get the Virginia Employment Commission to return my calls about some employment taxes, and I certainly would appreciate more self service apps that could answer the relatively simple queries I have. The VECs contact page for employers gives little more than phone numbers, and I havent had a real person answer the phone for several weeks – just a voice mail where I have to leave a message that no one will return. Im not feeling the love, and self service apps could go a long way to fixing that.
Another interesting comment Ms Feldman made to me was about cloud computing. Ideally the commonwealth would like to centralize the hosting of more agency IT applications, and a cloud computing environment is ideal for that. However, the agencies are very hesitant to use commercial solutions for this, and instead the Commonwealth is more likely to create its own cloud computing implementation that all the state agencies could utilize. Ms Feldman assured me that this would still allow agencies to support multiple operating systems, and that the state does not want to force everyone to use the same technology or platforms, they just want to enforce the contracts between services.
Thats good news, and the right way to architect an SOA system. If a centralized Commonwealth hosting solution dictated only the use of one or two technologies, it would work against some of the other main benefits of SOA: Increased Vendor Diversification and Increased ROI.