The Cornerstone of the IDP Nerve Centre: Information Sharing, Exchange and Collaboration

Issued by ACTIONiT, April 2004.

From the outset, the IDP Nerve Centre recognised the need to exchange information with a multitude of other information systems throughout government as a critical success factor. To make this possible, the IDPNC subscribes to the collaboration standards developed by ACTIONiT.

ACTIONiT is a non-profit standards development initiative aimed at establishing interoperability specifications for Decision Support Systems used across all three spheres of government in South Africa. Funded by the Innovation Fund of the Department of Science and Technology, it is the first known application of the open consortium based approach to standards development in South Africa. Pioneered by organisations such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) this approach has already revolutionized the development of standards that power the World Wide Web.

Looking back over the radical reform of planning, budgeting and management processes in local government over the past decade, it is perhaps not surprising that some concerns have been expressed about the alignment and coordination of policy, planning and budgeting processes across national, provincial and local spheres of government.

The challenge of alignment and coordination clearly has many dimensions. One of the dimensions foreseen by ACTIONiT is that the proliferation of incompatible systems that resulted from the pressures depicted in the diagram could seriously hamper alignment and coordination by the time that other dimensions of an institutional and legislative nature have been taken care off.

The fundamental problem that ACTIONiT therefore sought to address was to develop the means through which an essential level of compatibility can be maintained between different information and decision support systems without the need for central control and without detracting from the ability of entities in government to develop systems to meet their unique requirements. Based on the outcome of a user requirement study done in collaboration with 11 departments across all three the spheres, ACTIONiT concluded that the greatest impact in terms of alignment and coordination would be achieved from the exchange of project information, consistent spatial referencing of information and workflow automation between the core business processes of local government (as the primary delivery agent of government). This would:

• Strengthen the elusive link between planning, project prioritisation and budgeting across organisational boundaries.
• Maximize the potential of the annual budget as a coordination tool, because it may be the only time that all approved project actions for a municipality are planned and reviewed.
• Bridge the gap between project management systems and financial management systems, which often only speak to each other through summarised reporting in senior management forums.

Based on an appreciation of the business environment in which the decision support systems operate, ACTIONiT then developed specifications that enable participating systems to exchange project and spatial information through a Web Services Gateway developed in the Open Source domain. The significance of what has been achieved can best be demonstrated by comparing the challenge of establishing collaboration between decision support systems before and after ACTIONiT.

The typical situation before ACTIONiT was that any system that wanted to exchange information with any other system had to build and maintain one data adaptor to every other system that it wanted to collaborate with. As if it is not difficult enough to develop these adaptors, most of the systems continually change without any obligation of their owners to notify collaborating systems of the potential impact of these changes. After ACTIONiT the situation has fundamentally changed in that any system can now collaborate with any other participating system by building only one adaptor to the stable and standards-based common denominator provided by ACTIONiT in the form of collaboration specifications.

The significance of this breakthrough lies in the simplification of a many-to-many problem to a many-to-one problem; not only in terms of setting up the adaptors for the first time but especially maintaining them in an environment were most of the systems keep changing. In this respect ACTIONiT can provide an invaluable service to government by maintaining a common denominator consisting of a combination of conceptual data models, standardised semantic meaning and workflow automation through its open consortium-based approach and adherence to standards that power the World Wide Web.

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Enquiries:

Dr Louis Waldeck
for: ACTIONiT
Tel:+27 (0)12 841 2473
Fax:+27 (0)12 841 4036
Email: lwaldeck@csir.co.za