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January 15, 2004
Open Source in Government: Newport News, Va.
I spent three very hot weeks in Newport News, VA in August of 1983. I was doing some training at Newport News Naval Shipyard which forever changed my perception of the term "complex engineering project." Tim Adelstein has an interview at O'Reilly with Andy Stein, the CIO of Newport News (the town, not the shipyard) on his use of open source software in local government and the Open Government Interoperability Project. Leading up to the interview, Tom says:
A recent study by a city of 200,000 residents concluded that a computer upgrade would cost $30 million over a three-year period. Multiply that by as many as 20,000 cities and the hit to the economy starts looking significant. As we know, the only way to pay for such an upgrade involves increases in taxes, levies, and bonds. In our system, leaving those funds in the hands of the citizens has a better economic effect than trying to shove them through a bureaucracy.From LinuxDevCenter.com: Open Source in Government: Newport News, Va. [Jan. 15, 2004]
Referenced Thu Jan 15 2004 17:10:23 GMT-0700
Yes, its a lot of money. Vendors will always complain when the government starts a project like this saying "government shouldn't be competing with private industry." But the fact of the matter is, that all that money comes from somewhere and that somewhere is your pocket. I think open source software could save government millions of dollars and as a tax payer, I like that idea.
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Eric Knorr: Web Services Reach Critical Mass in 2004
Eric Knorr, InfoWorld's Executive Editor, has an article in CIO magazine where he predicts that Web services will reach critical mass in 2004.
A happy confluence of technology and politics has convinced me that this year will be the year when Web services begins to reach critical mass as a low-cost alternative to proprietary middleware.From The Year of Web Services - Pundit Web Services - CIO Magazine Dec 15,2003
Referenced Thu Jan 15 2004 10:22:57 GMT-0700
Eric believes that security and performance have been holding Web services back and two recent developments make those issues tractable:
- MIPs are always getting cheaper and IT budgets are loosening up.
- XML firewall appliances and other intermediaries are making the job easier.
Security is tractable, but requires compute power. Network performance issues can be overcome through compression, but again this requires compute power. We can solve that through faster machines or special purpose appliances.
I think Eric misses an important hurdle and that's interoperability. In the face of what many IT shops see as a blizzard of half-baked standards, most just decide to wait. This issue comes up in the question and answer period every time I give a talk on Web services. People are uncomfortable with what they see as an only semi-stable standards future. I think Web services intermediaries play an important role here by "standards proofing" a project. With versioning and the ability to translate multiple standards into each other on the fly, Web services intermediaries provide a handy abstraction layer between different network services. Unfortunately, most IT shops don't yet sufficiently understand the role of Web services intermediaries.