Have you got a “killer app” idea?

Our applications architect and chief strategist, Jim Morton, has spent a considerable amount of time locked in a dark room researching, formulating and presenting the various ICT strategies and principles that will drive our work going forward.

Following the approval of this work from the highest level, I am looking to take two key pieces of work, the Applications Strategy and New Wave Applications Approach, and use these to initiate a piece of work to develop a protoype application that can be delivered using mobile devices.

So, I need your help and your great ideas. If you believe your area of work, or even someone else’s, could benefit from the use of mobile applications, please get in touch. We want to enable delivery of services in new and innovative ways using mobile technology.

Drop me an email katesahota@warwickshire.gov.uk or contact me on Twitter @808kate with your ideas and I’ll be in touch. Ideally I’m looking for people who work at Warwickshire County Council so we can work together on this, however if you aren’t a colleague of mine and have a great idea, please send it on anyway and I’ll see what we can rustle up.

Desperately Seeking Developers

Hi, I’m a successful, mature (mid-30s) local government ICT department with a good sense of humour and a burning desire to fully implement my applications strategy.

I’ve often been left broken-hearted by long term commitments to ‘enterprise’ and proprietary products so I’ve decided to play the open standards field.

What I’m looking for is an experienced, innovative analyst programmer who really knows how to deeply satisfy a specification, but isn’t afraid to try something new, especially a bit of Ruby on Rails and maybe some RESTful web services.

Lets get together for good times, romantic lunches in Warwick town square and, who knows, maybe a bit of agile development?

I’ve got two posts available, so feel free to bring a friend…

For more info please have a look at this advert on the WM Jobs site, posts 2 and 3.

WCC iPhone application now with beta testers

Today, we’ve sent out the beta version of our WCC iphone application to the lucky people who will be kicking its virtual tyres for us. If this goes well, hopefully it will be appearing on the iTunes app store in the near future.

As well as providing Warwickshire citizens with a new and different way to keep up to date with the authority and find out how to access public services, the application is also helping to prove a number of strategic concepts that we want to embed into our ICT architecture at the council.

1. The benefits of using web services: All of the information presented on the phone is driven by our RSS feeds or a new set of XML web services. These will update the phone application dynamically with no lag or delay. We intend to re-use the exact same services for developing other web applications or applications for other mobile platforms – reducing duplication, cost and delays while increasing accuracy and efficiency. This will hopefully be the genesis of an API for the authority’s data and services.

2. Context specific services: While we have grander aims regarding contextual access to our services based on a variety of factors, the iphone application gets the ball rolling by presenting information in a geographically aware manner. A user can see how far they are from a specific service and then get directions to it from their current location.

3. Taking advantage of platform specific benefits: As well as the location based services that the mobile platform provides, we can also make phone calls directly from the application to a particular service.

4. Using cloud based/utility infrastructure: The back end system providing the XML services is hosted on the Amazon EC2 infrastructure, entirely independant of the WCC network. Working this way is allowing us to evaluate the cloud computing model and to understand the governance and constraints that must be managed to gain the benefits of working this way while minimising the potential risks.

These concepts have also been the focus of R&D projects as documented on our wiki at: http://abigbang.wikidot.com/

Finally, here are some screen shots to give you a quick idea of the application in action…

How ICT Strategy is changing the way that WCC works – with mentions for Twitter, YouTube, Ning, Facebook and the iPhone

It has been a fairly hectic (ie plenty of shouting and throwing things around) couple of months for James and I.

We have started to use the evidence we gained from the applications conceptual R&D work to further our ideas about building a service based architecture for the council, to help deliver all of the clever and futuristic technologies that our citizens will want and need in the coming years.

We’ve also got around to finally making a sign for the office door.

The momentum that the strategic approach has gathered has been helped in no small part by the increasing number of news stories and press releases detailing how the major IT suppliers are now trying to flog us all a Utopian cloud-based approach to personal and enterprise computing.

Added to this there are more examples everyday of how organisations are starting to take advantage of new ways of working via the cloud, web based applications, social networking tools and web services.

Our approach is still to do further R&D to define our architecture and then identify the technologies that we want to employ. However this is going to take us a little while. So in order to keep things moving along we have begun working with interested parties in the council to develop some new and innovative services using the concepts, methods and technologies which we want to introduce.

As these services develop and expand we will be producing more updates, our intent is that these pieces of work will provide us with experience and information to help construct the architecture. However we would also expect that if successful these examples will introduce some major changes in how WCC works, both with the public and internally.

Making use of Twitter

After quite a lot of discussion we will be looking at making use of Twitter in  a couple of ways – firstly as an additional channel for distributing WCC news. We will be interested in whether this is an effective idea and if so how to make best use of it. Also in exciting and breaking news it seems we will be starting to get our Councillors providing twitter updates. More news soon.

WCC on YouTube

Our news and media staff have launched a YouTube channel for the WCC. Strategically we believe that there is no point re-inventing the wheel for the distribution of content such as video – although there may be interesting challenges in terms of how we integrate content in such external stores as part of our overall content estate.

iPhone Application

The near-legendary WCC iPhone application is nearing completion. This is a project that will combine a number of the concepts we want to demonstrate while also providing a foundation for developing similar applications for other popular mobile platforms such as Android and Blackberry

The Future of Warwickshire Libraries

We have started to work with the forward thinking management of our libraries service to understand how they can best make use of emerging standards and technologies to provide innovative methods of delivering both traditional library services and also take advantage of social media to explore new types of services for their members. Platforms such as Facebook, Netvibes and Twitter will all be under consideration.

Social Networking and WCC communications

In addition to testing out twitter our news team has also set up a Netvibes page collating Warwickshire related news and information, you can check it out at: http://www.netvibes.com/wccmedia – this helps to show that there is already a wealth of information available via web service feeds.

Collaborative  working for local communities

In order to rapidly provide a platform to enable the work of WCC’s community forums we have adopted the use of the Ning platform to create a social networking platform specifically for this purpose. This was set up by our e-communications team and is now live for all citizens to get involved with. You can visit it here and set up an ID if you want to contribute: http://warwickshirelocalities.ning.com/.

An API for WCC

As part of the iPhone project we are starting to develop an Application Programming Interface for WCC information – so that developers have open and standard methods for interacting with the organisation’s information and services. This is an absolutely key strut of our strategic approach, although the information that will be available initially will be very simple we will no doubt learn some valuable lessons in how such an interface should be constructed, maintained and governed.

Exploiting Cloud/Utility Computing

We are starting to investigate the usage of cloud services for providing live services – in particular the Amazon products for rapidly providing flexible and scalable computing power and electronic storage. More news on this soon.

Service Oriented Infrastructure

More and more now we are seeing companies changing their business model and announcing Software as a Service options for customers. This week is no different as Dell announces several service offerings – what I would consider infrastructure services – referred to as Modular Services:

• Distributed Device Management Services
• Software Inventory and Usage Management
• Online Backup and Restore
• Laptop Data Encryption
• Email Management Services (EMS)
• Crisis Management and Alerting Services

For us this reinforces the work we are doing around Service Oriented Infrastructure.   We are not only seeing an increase in the quantity of cloud services but an increase in the scope, including more infrastructure based services.

Dell will be discussing their service offerings with the Register expert panel on 19th June 2009.   It will be interesting to hear more about the services and their thoughts on how their cloud based services can deliver efficiencies.

First R&D Phase Completed

The first part of our planned R&D work concluded yesterday. After doing some sterling work over the last six weeks, the team: Chris, Richard, Tanisha and Terry have returned to their respective teams in triumph although the planned ticker-tape parade around Warwick town square was abandoned due to health and safety concerns.

As hoped, the work carried out has built some concrete proof and much needed practical experience upon the concepts within our strategic vision. The work has been such a success that, prior to moving ahead with the architecture stage purely for applications, we will also be running conceptual R&D phases for two other key areas.

Identity: Understanding how we can will build a unified model for identity in order to provide targeted services and information to individuals – all while simplifying the user experience, integrating with other forms of web identity and ensuring complete security. Shouldn’t be too difficult.

Service Oriented Infrastructure: A terrifyingly technical sounding phrase. In the same way that we are looking to standardise and rationalise applications services to provide a series of building blocks to the organisation, we want to do the same with the elements of ICT that support application delivery. Example areas could include the storage of data, network connectivity and disaster recovery.

The second phase of R&D where we plan to specify the architecture that will be required to realise the benefits of the concepts will now cover all of these areas rather than just focussing on applications. Allowing us to begin building the new ICT architecture more quickly and bring forward all the exciting benefits that this will provide.

Meeting Demand

With the development of rich web based applications comes the risk that usage explodes overnight. This is great for the provider as they have obviously delivered something of value, however it does require a change behind the scenes, that is, how the service is hosted. What does this mean? Well, put simply, the processing power required to support 100 users as opposed to 10,000 is very different.

What is required? An infrastructure that is capable of automatically scaling to meet demand.

A simple concept, but one that is difficult to achieve. The service must remain unaffected by these ‘background’ changes otherwise users will become disgruntled and stop using it. Also the provider cannot simply throw lots of processing power at every service, this would be costly and in-efficient. A scalable hosting platform is required, one that is capable of recognising variation is demand and increasing and decreasing as required.

Solutions such as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Microsoft Azure demonstrate this concept is sound. Organisations are now recognising the benefits and adopting this approach, not just with externally hosted solutions but also within the organisation. The advent of ‘private clouds’, where an organisation is using technology products like VMware vSphere 4 to implement their ‘cloud’ and realise the benefits.

So what can we take from this? It is clear that the infrastructure is intrinsically linked to the applications and the two must be considered together to ensure the benefits expected from the new application development methods are realised. With this in mind Warwickshire County Council are ensuring that both application and infrastructure strategies are developed together.

How flexible are cloud based services?

I have been thinking about hosted services, more to the point how would you move cloud based services to another provider?

Let us assume that you are looking at using hosted, cloud based, services to run all or part of your business.   I am certainly reading more about people, well companies that are doing it so they must have considered the implications. I am interested to find out how much consideration has been put into the impact of doing so.

Take some obvious services: e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, instant messaging, calendar and address book and ask ourselves how you move to another service provider and maintain business continuity (that is transfer the data).   The issues I can see here are that each one provides these in a bespoke manner, for example data created within the applications and contact information is not easily transferable documents may be in an open format but is transferable?) and business may have used available APIs to enhance the basic service being provided.

Assuming all services were equal, how would you move all your data from Google to Microsoft Live?

Surely standards are required here – they may exist, I just haven’t found them – in order for customers to take full advantage, to ‘shop around’. The customer is faced with a problem – What is the best time to adopt a service?  Choose too soon and the service could be bettered, leave it too late they miss the opportunity to realise expected benefits. Worse they may even find added value from another provider and cannot take advantage of it.

Some service providers – The Sun Cloud – are approaching this by providing basic services and then giving access to them through an API (under the Creative Commons “Attribution” license) so services can be developed, promoting competition.   This is fine for services developed using their API but still does not address the broader issue of cloud based service migration.

So understanding if, when and how to adopt cloud based services remains a problem.   I feel there will be more to come from the main players, and no doubt some from left field.