Government App Sharing
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| Managing the future of government business systems The purpose of this article is to focus federal and state government attention to its most important business IT task. There is a common thread in a vast number of business problems that most problem solvers cannot see. It is government's largest business problem: incomplete and incorrect table design. Tables model the business. They are the heart and soul of how IT enables government to fulfill its mission. Tables are the closest approximation to the organization's processes. When tables are not designed correctly, IT is out of sync with government's mission. This problem manifests itself daily in constantly changing disguises, keeping perplexed managers busy fixing seemingly different issues. The details of how this happens is that badly designed tables, including tables failing to connect with their keys in data islands, force layers of bad programming code to form around them for decades, creating a never ending ripple effect extending to other computer systems where clients see the problem camouflaged as a lack of functionality in many areas their business processes. Here's a common business example, let's say your spouse signed up for the household electricity account, and the monthly statements only show your spouse's name because there was no data field for additional names. If you needed to demonstrate residency by showing the electric bill, it would be impossible. A one-to-many field was required for this but the programmer only created a single field for account owner. Every phone call that made to the electric company requires an explanation that your home's electric bill is not in your name. Another example is the frustratingly slow medical care that soldiers serving in the 2003 Iraq war received at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital. The medical care process could have been streamlined by improved table design allowing for better data sharing between the Defense Department and Veteran Affairs. [GA0 2007] The importance of integrating government data cannot be overestimated. The cost of not having integration affects every single government organization in terms of immense additional expenses and loss of services, and can spell the difference between life and death. While government generally understands that it should move towards integration, a striking example of government disintegrating its own data occurred around 2003 when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) took previously efficiently functioning integrated government disaster management components and contracted them out to private sector companies. The private companies did not have integration in place to communicate seamlessly as the government's system, and disaster responses during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 failed to work. Thousands of people died, partly because of the failed cooperation between the private companies. Government must learn that if it contracts out work, it must remain in charge of integration. [Leonard 2007] Besides the small group of people in the data modeling field, most people cannot recognize the commonality in the three disparate problems above. Most business IT problems arise from this problem, severely limiting IT alignment to government's mission. Bringing enterprise data to efficiency perfection The solution is for each government agency to create a position to function as a data architect defined in OMB's Federal Enterprise Architecture framework, focused exclusively on keeping data modeled correctly. Modeling the data correctly must be broadly defined to include removing redundancy across all units of the organization such as envisioned by the business reference model and integrating related data with outside government organizations via the data reference model. Enterprise Architecture is not solely data normalization on steroids, but that is the main idea. The data architect's role goes to the heart of government IT problem resolution by focusing the strongest problem solver on the root cause of the biggest problem. Much faster improvement
to government would come from the creation of a position similar to a
data architect but with the authority of the CEO within each organization,
and also for the state or federal government as a whole. Giving data designers
that much authority to re-engineer business processes enterprise wide
would avoid the slow road of voluntary cooperation within and between
government agencies. This topic entitled Chief of Enterprise Integration,
is discussed here; however
such big organizational change will not happen soon. Here is a roadmap
to resolving this problem with tools and people that we have now. Next->> Recommendations for Implementing Enterprise Data Architecture REFERENCES GAO report number GAO-08-207T entitled 'Information Technology: VA and DOD Continue to Expand Sharing of Medical Information, but Still Lack Comprehensive Electronic Medical Records' released on October 24, 2007 Leonard, Herman B.
and Howitt, Arnold M. (2006) "Katrina as Prelude:
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