Comments on: Architecture

By: robbie

robbie — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:36:16 +0000

continue, support or resume. totally agree, i’ve personally been arguing for this for some time at every available opportunity within government and to the eGIF community since at least 2005. see – http://bit.ly/9Wth5I – this was aimed squarely at a technical audience, but skip to slides 19 & 20…

By: robbie

robbie — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 23:36:43 +0000

In terms of Things To Do, and with reference to my previous comment in terms of a new role – 1 to 4 could then be replaced by simply taking the current crop of CIO/CTOs, lining them up against a wall, shooting and replacing them with staff who would be subsequently considerably more policy and business focussed? More practically, the problem here is essentially the same as vendor lock-in except it’s within the senior civil service – a great many of the holders of these roles simply do not have the background or the skills to fulfil them effectively.

By: robbie

robbie — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 23:26:09 +0000

agree with the key principles, but 2 seems a bit jumbled up – enabling engagement of small and medium IT business could, perhaps, be a principle in itself, but certainly to mitigate against large vendor lock-in. As for re-use, vendor lock-in and to break commodity from bespoke systems an excellent example would be external or cloud services such as at apps.gov. essentially, for many, many public sector business needs, there needs to be an appreciation it’s not something special or different that can demand a bespoke solution to its every requirement – instead it should seek to make best use of what the available technology can provide whenever possible – only when all other cloud, modular and COTS solutions have been exhausted should bespoke be even considered…

By: robbie

robbie — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 23:08:22 +0000

I’m not sure I agree that a new ‘senior’ role will necessarily help here – what’s really needed is for existing roles to be more policy led and engaged with their business owners surely? You wont get agility within government delivery by adding another layer of mandarin above it…

By: Paul Johnston

Paul Johnston — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 17:39:05 +0000

It is not clear in this section whether you are talking about business architecture or IT architecture or probably both. Also should there really be one architecture for the public sector or is more a question of having a consistency of approach or shared set of general principles?