Gov Ideas - 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.
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.
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 Government Enterprise Architecture
|
