Folks - Hi. Some of us would be aware that the IDA has just concluded a tender called for their Standard ICT Operating Environment - the SOE. It is worth S$1.5B and to the best of my knowledge, there are no open source solutions proposed by the 4 consortia.
The Tuesday insert (Digital Life fka Computer Times) has been singing "praises" about it without, IMHO, any analysis. I raised that as an issue with the editor and I have been offered a chance to submit an OpEd. I am enclosing the OpEd (this is version 2) and I expect to see it in print this coming Tuesday. I will post it on my blog on Tuesday and will include the original version (which they felt was too harsh). Harish ================================================== Building for the Future It has to be acknowledged that the IDA does have a good amount of forward planning in place when they called for the S$1.5 billion Standard ICT Operating Environment (SOE) project. The tender specifications (publicly available on www.gebiz.gov.sg) were silent on the technology choices, letting the four consortia to respond as they saw fit - and that is a good thing. We are in a sense re-building and renewing the government IT infrastructure that must survive the test of time and the vagaries of technologies. What is compelling in 2007, might be seen to be a big mistake in 2017. We are all aware of the wisdom that comes from hindsight. So, what has all of that to do with the SOE? For all the technology neutrality, the SOE is being proposed on the back of an non-existent national document format. A national document format is a fundamental pre-requisite for building, manipulating and archiving information within the government and to a larger extent the whole nation. Knowing what we know today about the fact that many a times, we are not able to retrieve electronic documents created using earlier waves of applications, we have to ensure that this mistake is not repeated. Let's consider an analogy. If there was a call to build a road and were totally neutral about the measurement schemes, then it is possible that proposals could come in metric, imperial or some other proprietary measurement schemes. We know that that is not the way to build a road or anything else for that matter. In that light, the basic measurement scheme of any IT project - SOE or otherwise - is the data format. If the data format is not stated upfront - whether open or proprietary - how are we to assess the value of the proposals? We have an even bigger problem here, because data (whether text, numbers, images, audio, video) needs to be readable long after the applications that created them have been displaced. The concept of document fidelity is extremely fundamental here and no project can ignore it. As has been gleamed from the SOE specifications, there is no stated document fidelity requirements nor indications of how these documents are to survive applications and be readable in the future. Industry intelligence indicates that all the solutions proposed for the SOE are based on proprietary, non-published document formats. This is like the road project being proposed in a measurement scheme that is only known to the special measurement tool. If you loose that tool, or the tool becomes obsolete, there is no easy way to recover. If the SOE had stated that, as a nation, we want to be able to have document fidelity and long term document survivability, then the solutions could compete on what does the job best. There is already an internationally approved and recognized document format called the ISO 26300. If the SOE had mandated that all the solutions must ensure compliance with ISO 26300, then all information gathered during the sunrise and sunset of the SOE project, will be accessible. The need for document fidelity is well appreciated by the Ministry of Defence (who are exempt from the SOE) and have essentially standardized on ISO 26300 (through their use of StarOffice and OpenOffice productivity suites). So, what would now happen is that government documents will have at least two different, incompatible formats - one for Mindef and one for the rest. Lessons from the tsunami disaster of 2004 in Thailand and the Hurricane Katrina disaster of 2005 in the US where agencies could not exchange data because of incompatible formats seem to be forgotten. It is still not too late. Changes, extensions and clarifications to the tender specification are still possible before it becomes a serious problem. An important benefit of adoption and mandating of ISO 26300 is that the government can easily switch out and use applications without any concern of document fidelity. Independence from document format lock-in has to be vigilantly defended. Do we need to have to have a Rosetta Stone for document formats? ================================================== _______________________________________________ Slugnet mailing list [email protected] http://www.lugs.org.sg/mailman/listinfo/slugnet
