Andy, Thanks for this.
I think your ideas are spot on the money.
I’d definitely be in favour of an approach that favours identifying broad categories and items of ‘functionality’ (in the broadest sense) and ‘what you should look (out) for in a standard’ to address those functionalities, rather than a hard-wired, tight-coupling.
At a more detailed level – keeping track of which standards are best adapted to which problem; who is using which ones; what are the latest versions, etc – I have drafted (but not yet submitted) a possible work item to the ‘OASIS eGov Member Section’ that could take this further.
I’ll talk with John (with his Member Section Chair hat on) and we can report back to the TC about whether we think the idea has legs and whteher it should be pursued as a Member Section work item or be dealt with in the TGF… In the meantime, below is some draft wording that I have proposed at the end of the collaborative stakeholder governance section that Nig, Chris and I worked on after last Thursday’s call – you will see in the final paragraph the relevance and link to your arguments - but, as I’ve mentioned to Nig and Chris, this might be placed elsewhere as it is of more general interest, not just restricted to the stakeholder model.
Comments on both the wording and the placement are welcome.
Cheers, Peter == draft – not for citation == Collaboration between TGF Programs The [collaborative stakeholder] model clearly focuses attention within any specific TGF program.
However (and increasingly) collaboration is required also between governments and, by implication, between TGF programs.
In the figure below, we see that collaboration between TGF programs is favoured at the political, legal and organisational levels and only later, if and when necessary, at the more ‘tightly-coupled’ semantic and technical levels.
This approach is also consistent with the SOA paradigm for service development – not only are requirements defined and services offered independently of any underlying technology or infrastructure but also one TGF program can be seen (and may need to be seen) as a ‘service provider’ to another TGF program’s ‘service request’.
For example, a business wishing to establish itself in a second country may need to provide credentials and government-authenticated information that is managed by a government agency in the first country.
A further advantage of this approach is that it becomes easier to identify and manage high level government requirements for services: whether in the choice of ICT standards that may need to be used to address a particular technology issue or determining the criteria for awarding public procurement contracts, this approach allows a ‘loose-coupling’ at the level of clearly defined high-level policy needs rather than the more tightly-coupled and often brittle approach of specifying particular technologies, software or systems.
== end ==
From: Andy Hopkirk [mailto:] Sent: Monday, 07 March, 2011 09:53
To: Colin Wallis
Cc: Greenaway Nigel; ; TGF TC List
Subject: Re: [tgf] RE: Issue 13 (General)- Technology Management Framework - need to include Core Standards Set? - open hi - sorry been out of the loop recently and not able to contribute... re: lists of standards... I'm with Peter below regarding the utility of lists - they will be at best a statement of the 'current most used/ useful' on the date of publication and out of date the next day. Remembering the long tail distribution in the CST survey outcome, you have to ask where would the cut off be applied? who would stand behind the decision? who would be responsible for regular/ irrelgular update cycles etc. etc. Sounds like 'hostage to fortune'-land for me; better surely to simply recognise that lists of standards are (i) useful - so you should [not 'must' to be compliant] have one to help your community get started (ii) time sensitive - because interop and IT standards in general are rapidly evolving and (iii) the inter-relation between standards in all their varieties with local standards policy(ies) and local procurement legalities are too various for this Framework to be definitive about this matter in all possible places. Yes, to be helpful, in supplementary material we could point to / report sets of standards that are commonly in use e.g. like these 'here', 'there', 'elsewhere' [fill in the 'best' most recent examples] and that a comprehensive survey in 2010 reported 'this distribution of usage' worldwide [link to the CST survey result]. The gathering and maintenance of the list of the 'top 20 % of standards in use by 80% of the Framework users' would certainly be a useful piece of intelligence to maintain - if someone will pay for the gathering and analysis effort and subsequent reselling costs :-) Hope this is useful, Andy On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 9:54 PM, Colin Wallis <
> wrote: Yep, I think giving examples of profiles of standard X or Y would offer more value, but they are just examples, since there are country or industry specific contexts for them in most cases so they may not suit all situations. Cheers Colin
From: Greenaway Nigel [mailto: ] Sent: Wednesday, 2 March 2011 3:43 a.m.
To: ; TGF TC List
Subject: [tgf] RE: Issue 13 (General)- Technology Management Framework - need to include Core Standards Set? - open I'm happy that we address this aspect later. WRT lists of standards, perhaps we could take Peter's stance but provide one or more profiles of those that eork together. Ths could ultimately lead to a reasonanly finite set which would assist product suppliers across multiple territories and aid interoperability and reuse. Regards Nig
