Hierarchy of State Government Reuse
I’ve recently been re-reading Scott Ambler’s excellent work on the Enterprise Unified Process and focusing my attention on the strategic reuse discipline, in particular. Dealing with this on a day-in, day-out basis, I’m trying to apply this particularly to the business domain that I work in, state government. I like the way that Scott went about illustrating the enterprise management disciplines with the traditional RUP workflow maps. Above and beyond this, he borrows from an earlier article of his, A Realistic Look at Object-Oriented Reuse, to create a couple of diagrams that really hit home. I’ve taken the opportunity to adopt these diagrams to enterprise work being done in state government. The adopted diagram can be found below.
The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006
On September 26th, President Bush signed into law the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. The represents the first piece of legislation sponsored by upstart Illinois senator Barack Obama to make it into law. Being touted as the “Google for Government”, the law directs the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to oversee the creation of a single comprehensive searchable Web site that would include information on all federal grants, contracts, and other funding awarded to public and private organizations. As the President mentioned at the signing, the federal government issues more than $400 billion in grants, and more than $300 billion in contracts to corporations, associations, and state and local governments. These range from reputable grants to operate state Medicaid systems to questionable allocation of funds such as the hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to build a bridge to a virtually uninhabited island in Alaska, the so called “bridge to nowhere”. Although at way to high a level to be a true comparison, the Death and Taxes graph provides a good representation of what we might end up seeing.
State Government Pattlet - Case Transfer
Following up on a long-standing desire to get domain knowledge out of our heads and onto paper, a colleague and I engaged in writing our first state government pattlet. We spent about two weeks of our spare time putting together an abstract approach to case transfer based upon our varied experiences. We finally have a draft version which we feel comfortable sharing online.
NASCIO 2006 Recognition Awards
The nominations for the 2006 NASCIO state government recognition awards are now available online. There is some really interesting and innovative stuff in here.
Software Engineering Processes and the BSCoE SEP
In addition to the technical assets that I’ve mentioned in previous blog postings, BSCoE also makes a set of software process assets available. These software process assets are arranged into disciplines and collected under the umbrella of BSCoE’s Software Engineering Process (SEP). Information about the BSCoE SEP is available online to the general public.
Keystone Technology Plan Issued
Pennsylvania’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) issued the Keystone Technology Plan to serve as the information technology blueprint through the year 2009. The plan’s phased approach is quite interesting, with the following phases taking center stage:
e-Government Mashups
Phil Windley’s recent post on e-Government mashups is a great introduction to the topic of citizen-facing Web services. As refreshing as it is to see that progressives in Rhode Island and the District of Columbia are exposing government data to their citizens and opening themselves to the law of unintended consequences, this only scratches the surface of what is possible. As I’m sure Phil knows as a former state CIO, fully open citizen self-service is likely to only go so far. As cool as it is to mashup public highway, crime, and public entity data on a map for the world to see, enabling truly effective government is going to be, to a greater extent, dependent upon empowering government knowledge workers. Imagine if, as an example, a knowledge worker was able to pull together information from their state’s welfare, criminal justice, and revenue (i.e. tax) systems and mash these up in a way that enabled them to uncover hidden relationships between this data and serve the state’s citizens more effectively.
BSCoE4J Java Framework
The BSCoE4J Java application development framework was released today to the Commonwealth and is now available for download. The framework contains both abstract and concrete components that support the creation, manipulation, and persistence of domain objects. It interfaces well with, and is meant by no means to supplant, well-understood open source frameworks that address presentation layer, persistence layer, or domain object creation and discovery challenges.
BSCoE Awarded 2006 Computerworld Laureate
The BSCoE project recently received a Computerworld Honors Program laureate honoring the project for its use of information technology to benefit society. It looks like the official case studies and pictures of the award ceremonies have been posted online. You can find the BSCoE case study here. I’ve also included a couple of interesting photos from the Computerworld ceremonies including the snapshot of our client receiving the award.
BSCoE to use Logidex
The official press release just came out announcing that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania will be using LogicLibrary’s Logidex product as its asset metadata repository. This is quite an exciting development since it will afford BSCoE the opportunity to automate many of the asset cataloging, management, and approval functions that would have otherwise been manual processes.