More than a few people are starting to get active again around shared services, enterprise architectures, shared data centres (and all of the SaaS, HaaS and maybe just plain old aaS that could bring). A while ago I wrote a document that I hoped would lead to a debate on delivering some or all of those things into UK government. The document largely languished on my hard drive gathering virtual dust like so many reports about what government should do to make things better. It never quite got finished although, looking through it now some 6 years after it was written, it still seems to hang together pretty well.
With the recent stirring, I thought I’d air my thoughts again and so have published the document online for any and all to look at. Maybe it will help move the debate on, maybe it will help stop some of the old problems being revisited with the same results occurring. I hope that it is, at least, useful for someone – whether in the UK or elsewhere. If you make use of it, I’d appreciate a credit back to this post or a note in the comments section that points me to where you’ve used it so that I can see what I missed, or what you have done to extend the thinking.
Kicking off any programmes that involve departments, agencies, federal or local bodies in sharing, re-using and piggy-backing off each others’ work is challenging. Those that take it on now deserve all of the support that they need.
The slide that accompanies this post certainly qualifies as one of the ugliest I’ve ever produced (definitely not the ugliest, but I’ll save that one for another day). The Enterprise Architecture document can be found on Box.net by following this link which will open in a new window.
