Oliver Bell’s weblog

This will be a post of unfair generalizations, regardless of what I say in the next few paragraphs it should be noted that countries around the region are generally doing an outstanding job of driving their respective eGovernment Programs - there is always room to reflect and improve though.

The 2008 eGovernment Readiness Survey has been published by UN/DESA and in turn we have see ZDNet report that some countries around the region have dropped in their overall rankings.

From Vivian Yeo’s article;

Several countries in Asia have slipped in e-government readiness rankings, according to a new study released by the United Nations (U.N.). [..]

[..] With an index score of 0.447, the Asian region fared slightly below the world average of 0.4514 in the e-government readiness index. Europe proved the best-performing region, boasting a score of 0.649, while the Americas scored 0.4936.

Given that the survey work that UN/DESA undertake reflects eGovernment projects from around the globe it is important to recognize that the rankings are comparative, so this does not mean that a move in the rankings suggests that a given program is succeeding or failing, just moving in ranking against other countries in the world.

At the same time there are some exciting highlights from around the region in the report, with countries such as Korea and Vietnam scoring well for the work that they are doing in the exciting and emerging area of eParticipation.

So, if your national programs are beginning to slumber a little what can you think about to restart and refresh them? I have three ideas that you might want to start with.

Leadership. When most national level plans kick off they usually do so with support from senior leadership within the respective government, sometimes a senior civil servant or ministerial level politician. This leadership is important both in terms of strong senior support which helps to get past some of the bigger hurdles that stand in the way of delvery and ensuring that the technology aligns well with the business of government.

At this point in time a lot of eGovernment programs are several years into their original plan, the original leadership has moved on to think about other big issues. Now is a great time to reach out to those same people with new and exciting ideas of what can be done in the next phase of your program, work with them to establish support for your next big adventure.

Clarity of Vision. Another symptom of aging programs is that the original plans tend to fragment across various departments and become a little hazy. In this environment it gets increasingly harder for departments to understand how they work together, for industry to establish a plan to get involved with your program and for citizens to understand what services are on offer or how to use them.

It is worth thinking about all of your work around eGovernment, looking at how the programs fits together at a national level and considering many of the new technologies, increased broadband speeds, mobile communications and other advances can be used to bring new benefits to your programs. A clear vision around how all these pieces fit together is invaluable for the many groups who want to get the most out of your program.

Simplify the Technology. Finally, over the last five years we have seen significant advances in the way that technology integrates, with much of the functionality that would have been hard to deliver now being available out of the box. Microsoft has been building reusable plans and components like the Connected Government Framework, or for local government the Citizen Service Platform which help you get started and deliver services more rapidly and efficiently.

Of course, these three ideas won’t solve everything, but they will give you some insight into where to focus as you refresh your current plans and prepare for the years ahead.

eGovernment is as exciting an area today as it was ten years ago, with plenty of additional technologies maturing to a point where they are useful components of government programs, and a plethora of new ideas around how to streamline services that improve service to citizens and businesses.

Now is a great time to take a look at the survey data coming out of the United Nations, reflect on your own national program and put a plan in place for an exciting decade ahead!

Earlier this week Korea’s largest producer of Office Automation software announced that they will support both Open XML and ODF in the next version of their product.

This is extremely significant for Korean users of Haansoft’s Hangul package, where as I understand it the number of users of Hangul outweighs users of any other office package.

You’ll find an English version of the announcement on ZDNet’s Korean site;

On Thursday 13, it announced that it planed to support not only ‘ODF’(Open Document Format), the standard of International Organization for Standardization (IOS), but also ‘Open XML’, promoted by ECMA International, in its next version of Hangul software. 

By supporting internationally recognized open type documentation standards in its new version of Office, Haansoft plans to cultivate its competitive power and lead the standardization of domestic office documentation.

There is substantial coverage of this in the Korean press, if you are interested in reading more then the following links will help. (in Korean)

Chosun, Money Today, ETNews, FNNews, ZDNet, DDaily, HeraldBiz, INews24 and eToday.

In discussions about Open XML one of the questions I get asked most frequently is one that was originally presented by noooxml.org and our colleagues at a large and well known competitor. “We already have an international standard for document formats, why do we need another?”

The answer is a straight forward one, Open XML has different design objectives to other document standards, those differences are defined in the first few paragraphs of the Office Open XML specification.

• Open XML provides for the migration of existing Microsoft Office binary documents to the new XML format, providing new levels of transparency and access to existing data.
• Open XML provides a mechanism for the use of Custom XML schema as part of the document format.

When you look at those two unique requirements the first is backwards looking, protecting the huge existing investment in binary documents, the second requirement is not only very forward looking, but for the developer community it is probably one of the most exciting features of the Office Open XML specification.

I’ve talked a little before about custom schema in Open XML, but only recently realized that it was not obvious what this unique proposition is that is offered by the Ecma-376 specification.

Two weeks ago I was in Beijing where I was presenting at an international standards conference organized by OASIS, I was presenting on Open XML and how Microsoft proposed to interoperate with the Open Document Format and the Chinese office document standard, the Uniform Office Format.

After my presentation I found myself chatting to a well known blogger in the standards and open document space, and as part of the conversation he and I were discussing the difference between ODF and Open XML at a very conceptual level. He drew a diagram on a piece of paper that looked a little like the graphic below, personally I think it gives a very clear picture of the role that custom schema plays, one of the key differences between Open XML and ODF, and how the two document formats could interoperate in the longer term.

The graphic talks about the role that Office Open XML compliant applications have in wider business processes within an organization, moving well beyond the traditional office automation file format that we have all become used to over the last twenty or so years. It also shows how converter technology will assist users of the ODF file format (along with other file formats) who want to convert their documents to Open XML or vice versa.

The same applies to UOF for which conversion tools between Open XML and UOF already exist, the Beijing event was a great opportunity to demonstrate this additional converter to a few people working in this space in China.

If you cast your mind back just over a year or so you might remember this agreement that Microsoft announced with Intel and RosettaNet to develop the next generation of their supply chain standards around Ecma Open XML.

It turns out that RosettaNet do a lot of their development work in their labs in Malaysia, and we are starting to see fruits of their efforts appear in the market.

This week there have been several stories in the press in Malaysia about the development work that has been taking place, and this morning you will find a regional article on ZDNet Asia.

From the article;

“Having proven itself to be a successful standard with large enterprises and multinationals operating in Malaysia, RosettaNet is now moving into its next phase of encouraging local Small Medium Industries (SMIs) to automate their procurement processes,” Foong said.

“Open XML opens up exciting opportunities for RAE based solutions, such as its support for custom defined schemas which facilitates wider success of e-commerce, while assuring users of long-term preservation of data.

“Another benefit of Open XML for the SMI community is its capability of storing and managing business data in documents, resulting in lower costs for implementing business process automation that enhances global competitiveness,” Foong added.

Foong Heng Huo, is the director of RosettaNet Malaysia.

This work with RosettaNet very clearly demonstrates the value that the Ecma Open XML draft brings to implementation of business process systems, something that you just can’t do with “other” formats.

 Another very long post I’m afraid… I promise to try harder in future.

 A couple of days ago the comments on another post strayed into the area of custom schema support in the Ecma Open XML specification. In my reply I documented a scenario that explained how this functionality might be put to use by developers. This is a really exciting part of the Open XML functionality, so I thought it might be worthwhile pulling the comment out into a post in its own right… so here it is.

The scenario below looks at how the Open XML specification may be used in a medical environment, looking at how some data that starts off being input into a document may pass through a series of systems, both internal and some provided externally.

First of all forget about the file format as an office automation document for a moment, and think about it as a container for data in its raw form. The Ecma Open XML spec defines a way to embed custom schema into the document that can represent just about any data you like, then guarantee that it will remain intact as one application or another opens the document, works with it then saves it out.

Now bringing it back to being a document format again, Open XML allows you to bind elements from those custom schema back to properties in the document if you choose, so not only can the custom schema be manipulated by automated systems, but also by a user through a form in their office automation application.

If we apply that to our health-care scenario then you can imagine the Open XML document being used in a diagnosis process. A clinician opens up an office automation app and documents the patients symptoms into custom fields in the document. When the document is saved the patient data is stored independently as a custom schema in the docx file.

As a next step a billing system picks up the newly created document and embeds a second custom schema into the document that includes invoice information that will eventually make its way back to the patients health-care insurer. An addition to this scenario that is only important in so much as it shows that a single document can have multiple embedded custom schemas. The billing system only needs code to work with the OPC, it does not need to deal with the document, or the diagnosis information.

As a final step, I’ll submit my encapsulated patient transaction to a web service somewhere that analyzes the custom XML document that describes the patients symptoms, and as a result drops a third custom schema into the OPC that details a possible diagnosis and some suggested medication. Again, no office automation involved, and no need for the web service to understand the document or the billing schema.

The original clinician can then reopen the document in their original office automation app and work with all the new information that has been added by various systems.

What is important about the way Open XML deals with this is the segmentation of the data and the ability for the developer to decide up on the structure of the custom embedded schema. This means that the Open XML spec is not dictating how this data is stored, and developers can embed any one of the thousands of XML based business schema standards that exist in the world today. In the example above, for the US, a developer might choose to embed the HL7 schema into the Open XML file.

This capability in itself is a lot more to do with being able to use Open XML in end point systems in a larger SoA environment, and a less to do with what you might traditionally think of in terms of office automation apps, although of course the office automation app still has a key role to play whenever the document reaches a user.

I use a health-care example, but it could be any business process, and I’m already seeing examples of enterprise organizations doing this sort of work in scenarios such as supply chain or banking processes.

Can you do this with other doc formats? Well, most of them just are not designed to do this. The majority of the plethora of document formats that are out there are designed with pure OA or document presentation in mind. For those that do allow the embedding of custom data elements it isn’t clear to me that this data would be protected as it passes through different applications, or that it would possible to implement in a form that allows the segmentation of the data and the conformance to existing business process schema standards.

You can see a demo of how this might look for the user in this video. The demo is based upon work in Microsoft Word, but it could be done in any other application that supports Open XML embedded custom schema.

Back in July Inchone, an e-Learning company based in Singapore, announced that they were going to add Open XML support to their e-Learning products. In their announcement they talk about some of the advantages that they will garner through the use of the file format specification.

From their announcement;

In collaboration with Microsoft, Inchone started on early June 2007 to explore on developing a solution based on Microsoft Excel 2007 file format, which is OpenXML based, to mass upload user profile. Below are the results and clear benefits of the development:-

• Saving on licensing fees as Excel is not required to be installed at the server
• Excel services launching and clean up is not needed
• Better performance, since no need to create Excel object at the server
• Thousands of records can be imported in, by multiple users without impact to performance
• More than 50% file size saving as OpenXML file is in zipped format
• Users will have options to use Excel or other text editing tools to change the file content (e.g.
  notepad)
• Increase in security as the OpenXML file can be encrypted

Inchone is currently also working on using OpenXML for offline assessment engine, mass upload of QTI based quizzes and reusable Content creation. Inchone strongly believe that the adoption of OpenXML will benefit the company, its clients and the IT industry as a whole.

I’ve been a little slow on catching this one, but I think that it is a great example of the types of benefit that organizations will see from the published Ecma 376 file format specification.

As information on various projects like this that I have bumped into over the last few months becomes public I’ll be sure to share it with you.