Going formal with the applications strategy

There has been a recent directive here that we all need to smarten up a bit, myself in particular. So I have returned to wearing a suit at work.  So instead of looking like some sort of  dodgy student in jeans and a dodgy shirt, I now look like some sort of dodgy student in a suit. Comments such as “Job Interview?”, “Court appearance?”, or even the especially hurtful “You look like a used car salesman” have been thrown at me with increasing regularity in the last few weeks.

In an incredibly weak link, we are also working on formalising our applications strategy.

This strategy has been different from other areas that we have been working on, in that it has been established through practical work, rather than a purely conceptual exercise. A chunk of our systems centre developers have been on real live projects using the principles laid out in our 2008 classic release “New Wave Applications Blueprint”. The Open Data site, the iphone application and the HR-Electronic Records system are all examples of projects that have both helped to develop (and have benefited from) the approach laid out in the bluepint.

Now we have reached the point where we have proved the vision achievable and now need to formalise the techniques methods and technologies that we want to roll out so that all new applications are developed in line with the strategy rather than a select few.

So each of the members of the team has been assigned a technology/best practice area to specialise in (examples include web service definition, presentation standards, use of GIT as a code repository etc) and are currently beavering away to produce the definitions, standards and processes that we will then roll out to the rest of the organisation through training, mentoring and violent brute force.

In concert with this I am writing up a more formal Applications Strategy document (hopefully to be released before the end of April) which will also help form the basis of our overall ICT Strategy refresh later on the year.

We are currently having all sorts of interesting discussions on strengths and weaknesses of specific development technologies. Although as our strategy is all about avoiding proprietary issues and embracing open standards – these discussions should have no effect on the way that we choose to work in the future, but may help to confirm the types of skills and training that we need to concentrate on.

A condensed preview of our web strategy

As I often complain, it is a big challenge in my line of work to make things sound fun, or at least interesting, or at least not that dull. For instance, the first line of draft 0.3 of the “Proposed Web Strategy For WCC” is a note to myself highlighted in very bright yellow to come up with a much better title.

Fortunately I was able to find a decent quote to introduce my reasons for why we need to develop a new approach to the web. In 1993 William Gibson was quoted in an interview as saying “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed“.

Admittedly it is something of a reach for me to jump from Neuromancer to the concerns of a local government ICT department – but the maturity and reach of the “future“ that was possible in 1993 has now been fulfilled with the widespread adoption of a standards driven world wide web and the availability of high speed communications links to a large proportion of the public.

As such a whole new world of opportunities and threats has opened up for organisations like WCC, which leads to reasons why we need to re-evaluate our stance towards the web and how we interact with it. I’ve banged on about this in the document for quite some time, but in a very condensed summary:

• There are loads of new and emerging technologies that it would be great if we could exploit.
• Public expectations of what can be done via the web are expanding all the time and we need to keep up.
• Pressures from legislation (e.g. more open data and transparency) and the rise of the enigmatic “3rd sector”.
• The fact that the organisation is going to need to make some changes to exploit the benefits and avoid the risks.

In addition to these high level considerations, we have a number of very pressing business needs to satisfy, as well as the ongoing requirements to save money, do more with less, become more efficient and finally perfect that process for turning lead into gold.

So to understand our specific needs we are complimenting the pure strategic stuff with an exercise to gather the requirements and priorities for electronic service delivery across all areas of WCC.

Once we understand our priorities the strategy then goes on to suggest (at some length again) that there are four main aims that we should work towards to help fulfill our service delivery requirements, while taking advantage of the benefits that the web can now offer us. NOTE: These ideas are still up for discussion so may be different by the time the strategy is completed, but I’ve included them here to give you an idea of the concepts we are developing:

1. Embrace the practice of using ICT as a Utility: It is now possible to consume software, development platforms and infrastructure from the cloud which can potentially lead to many benefits. We need to understand where working this way will help save us time and money as well as avoid extensive development in re-inventing the wheel where a product or service can be used off the shelf. As an example our open data site is already provided using the Ruby on Rails platform as a service provider Heroku.
2. Warwickshire as a service: This is a (hopefully) catchy way of saying that we need to expand our initial work on open data to include as many of our data sets and services as possible i.e. build an open API for the organisation. The vision is that both internal and external developers will make use of the same building blocks for creating services applications and web sites.
3. Rational approach to information management: We need to overcome the historical and technical silos that we have built up around information to build single sources of the truth and gain a clearer understanding of the context around our data and documents. This will allow us to build more useful, accurate applications and web sites as well as providing clear understanding of which information must be kept safe and secure.
4. Use the web to extend the organisation: We need to move from an arms-length model of interacting with the public web via a curated web presence and individual point solutions for deeper interaction to becoming an organisation that is engaged with the web at a cultural as well as technical level. Staff at WCC need to merge the web into their everyday work-life in the same way that they do in their personal lives.

As I said this is a very condensed overview of what is in the current draft document. If you have any comments or questions please let me know, or if you have a brilliant title I could use there may be a drink in it for you.