Our trip to the states couldn't be more timely as they have just published their government digital strategy.
It's a good piece of work that I suspect will set the direction for federal government over the next few years irrespective of who is in the Whitehouse. A key theme is the need to, as they put it...' innovate with less' . A concept that will sound familiar to a UK audience. As funds are stretched tighter and the requirement to improve digital services becomes more pressing we need to look to share our capacity to develop systems and we will have to open up data to a variety of players to help us find meaning in information and understanding to complex problems.
There are commitments in their strategy for state departments to open up APIs to useful government data sets with clear milestones. APIs (application programming interface) are the hooks that allows other systems to latch on and use the content.
The conceptual model describes three layers:
- Information layer - both structured and unstructured information
- Platform layer - describing the management principles around content management , APIs etc
- Presentation layer- the standards that will other services to be delivered across a variety of media.
It has similarities to our own Information Strategy with a decoupling of data from its presentation to the public. This clarity offers us the opportunity to make the rhetoric of 'record once and use many times' a reality.
I am pleased to see the same important debates in the US about data security and confidentiality and the need to protect patient identifiable data.
If we lose sight of that - we lose everything!
Mark Davies
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