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July 29, 2003
Enterprise Architecture Certification
I spent the day with John Gotze from Denmark discussing Denmark's enterprise architecture initiatives. I hope to write some additional thoughts on enterprise architecture later. While we were talking, John mentioned, the Federal Enterprise Architecture Certification Institute which was, coincidentally, related to this morning's post on the NDU CIO certification program. I'd never heard of FEACI before, even though I heard its executive director, Felix Rausch, speak at the Federal CIO conference I spoke at in May.
07:16 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Federal CIO Certificate Program
The National Defense University offers several interesting certification programs for federal IT managers in IT management. The CIO Certificate Program requires coursework in eleven areas:
- Policy
- Information Resources Strategic Planning
- Leadership/Management
- Process Improvement
- Capital Planning and Investment
- Performance and Results Based Management
- Technology Assessment
- Architectures and Infrastructures
- Security and Assurance
- Acquisition
- eGovernment/eBusiness
The eGovernment Certificate Program requires coursework in eight areas:
- Policy
- Planning and Organization
- Change Management
- Architecture and Enterprise Integration
- Financial Resources
- Performance Management
- Security and Privacy
- Human Capital or Information and Knowledge Resources
These courses are necessarily focused on the needs of the Federal government, but state and local IT managers can sign up on a space available basis.
Don't overlook training and education as a means of changing your organization. If you want to change the culture of your organization, focus on creating training courses for your managers that teach them the principals you want in the new organization. I wish I'd concentrated more on this when I was CIO for Utah. We did some of this by establishing the Product Management Council which has done a great job at educating a whole crew of eGovernment product managers inside Utah state government. We could have done much more, especially on the IT management side. The best way to manage change in an organization is through education.
08:11 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Binary XML
In September, the W3C will host a workshop on binary XML formats. Your first reaction may be the same as mine: what the heck is binary XML? Binary XML is an attempt to find a common format for communicating pre-parsed XML trees to reduce bandwidth and the time it takes to parse large XML documents. The audience is primarily embedded and similar applications, but of course, once the genie's out of the bottle, it will be used in all sorts of applications. The announcement lists several advantages:
- It would not be restricted to a single schema or vocabulary, and hence could be interoperable between vocabularies;
- It would not be restricted to a single application or hardware device, and hence could be interoperable between implementations;
- Improved network efficiency and reduced storage needs: compression techniques that make use of domain-specific knowledge often do better than more generic compression;
- Sending pre-parsed data could reduce the complexity of applications, and may facilitate creation of simpler internal data structures.
- Web Services may need more efficiency, and a pre-parsed binary transmission format may help people to continue to work with Web Services rather than to explore proprietary interfaces
The biggest disadvantage is that pre-parsed data does not conform to the view source principal that has served the Web so well. In that sense, pre-parsed data doesn't seem Restian.