Data integration and transparency for better government

• Efficiency:  Information is an under-utilized asset in government, according to Eric Sweden of the National Association of State CIOs. “Information that is not shared can’t be used by anyone other than the holder of that information. Information is an enterprise asset. If it’s not shared, are we getting the value out of it? We have a cost to maintain it, archive it, and protect it, but if we’re not sharing it, the enterprise is not benefiting from its full value. If information is not shared across the enterprise, then we find ourselves in the common scenario of maintaining multiple instances of the same information.  Without proper administrative controls to keep those instances in sync, we face the potential risk of inaccurate or inconsistent information which can significantly impact the effectiveness and efficiency of business decision making. It’s more expensive to maintain because those who need it are maintaining it redundantly.” 

• Better service delivery:  Web services can also enhance delivery of government services, Sweden says. “We’ve got a generation of people growing up here who ask ‘why not?’ They are saying to individual agencies, ‘Why do I have to tell you the same information again? I just gave the same information to this other agency. Aren’t you connected?’ They’re going to be challenging government, saying ‘I don’t want to go through this again.’ They’re looking for convenience, they’re looking for access to government via the web because they don’t want to make a physical trip to an office…. They’re computer-literate, they’re comfortable with computers, they do almost everything on a computer and they’re saying ‘Why can’t I deal with government on my computer?’”

• Leveraging citizen participation:  Phil Windley, former Chief Information Officer for the state of Utah, sees value in going beyond government-to-government data exchange, by making some web services accessible to the public. “Putting data out—not just building e-government applications, but putting data out—helps you leverage an entire set of developers, product managers and other people who are interested in building applications with that data, in a very similar way to the way open source works. Call it ‘open data’…  The same reason why open source is successful in leveraging other people is a good reason to suspect that we can leverage other people if we make data available.”

• Breaking down silos:  Silo-smashing is another fundamental benefit that web services can bring to government. Brand Niemann of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that data silos are “a systematic problem in the government. Congress funds IT systems by program within each agency…. We have 32 major systems that the states collect data for. We have legislation mandating these data silos. You’re not going to change that, but you can use web services to pull data together.” Both Niemann and Windley see data silos as inevitable in a decentralized government structure like ours in the United States. Both see the decentralization as generally positive, but the resulting data silos as problematic. Windley notes that “Web services allow us to keep the decentralized nature of government, and maintain the benefits that we see from that in terms of governance, and at the same time break down the barriers to providing good service to citizens. What you’d like is an application that takes data from at least three different agencies to build a single application…. With web services we can build that application because the data is available. Everybody gets to keep their own data, everybody keeps their own business processes, and yet the application can still be built and managed by some group. We keep the decentralization and the benefits that it has, and we can mitigate some of the disadvantages, particularly in the area of IT.”

• Better decision-making:  Better decision-making is also at stake in the campaign for web-based information sharing. “If decision-makers have the information in front of them, they can make better decisions about where to direct resources,” Sweden says. “If that information is held back, they’re going to make decisions based on just what they know. If they don’t know everything, then clearly their decisions are going to be less effective. That’s where we get down to the value of information. If it is not shared, then it’s not impacting decision-making in all the circumstances where it could or should be.” Officials with an “executive dashboard” of data provided by various services, Sweden adds, can base their actions on the best information available.

• Government transparency:  Windley sees value in the transparency that public web services can provide: “It does increase government transparency and accountability. Some people don’t like that but I think it’s probably what is required for good government.” This principle is echoed by District of Columbia city administrator Robert Bobb on DCStat web site: “The guiding principle for streaming city agency information to the web is to enable residents to better understand our government’s activities, thereby offering more opportunities to participate in improving the quality of life and promoting economic development in the District.”

• Emergency response: Lack of interoperability has been frequently cited as a contributing factor that hampered government responses to the 9/11 and Katrina disasters. Web services can deliver interoperability. No other current technology has a realistic chance of linking many disparate units of government in real time.