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It isn't just money. Some agencies have duties
to perform that would work much better if they had
standard data structures. DoD and Public Safety
are two examples. It has taken years and years
of work to get the DoD entities to adopt common
data standards and I don't know what the outcome
of that has been not being a contractor there today.
In public safety, recent events have shown just how
dire the need is for the systems to communicate
in real time (simple radio communications and
other wireless devices), but when you step back
to look at the big picture, the need for sharing
information in less than near real time is even
greater. But the same slow moving, let's do it
top down processes that bedeviled CALS are settling
in there as the marketing tiger teams sit back
on their butts waiting for direction from a slow
forming mega-bureaucracy in the Beltway. Just
as CALS managed to waste billions down the
rat holes of consultancies and committee lead
conferences, the Homeland Defense teams lead
by retired brass will do the same.
Meanwhile, the war goes on.
What is required is industry leadership in
the industries that can make a difference.
It has to be recognized plainly and clearly
and without refutation or lawyerly marketing
wonkspeak just who's job it is to get the
kinds of secure interoperable communication
systems in place. It is the responsibility
of the CEOs and CIOs of each of these companies
to go to their development staffs and ask for
possible approaches, to take these results
and prototype, then present these to the
customers, not to the brass in bhe beltway.
We have jobs to do. We should be doing them
and not waiting for the brass to move. Yes,
that has risks. Tell me what doesn't.
The problems of interagency communications are
massive, but parts of it are just local illusions,
and that is the problem with Walter's approach.
We shouldn't be calling local illusions software
expertise and trusting the machine point of view.
We have over 50 pages of configuation options
in some of our applications to make it possible
to take semi-shrinkware and field it. Our high costs
are not the software development; they are implementation
in local agency sites. Some problems are real; the
scaling factors of workflow between very large and
very small agencies are real. But the data model,
the labels, are remarkably consistent in what they
describe if not in what they call that.
These agencies spend unreal amounts of money
and time on import/export in comma-delimited
ASCII to hook up edge systems (say fingerprint
ident) to their records management systems, and
more so that the local sheriff and the local
police can talk to the local jail. We
make decent money on intellectual sloth and
not-invented-here. Some try to enter our
business field and lose their shirts because
they assume naively that comp-sci is an adequate
background, but it isn't. It takes SMEs to sort
out the issues, but believe me, most of the time,
we are simply making a local mayor or police chief
happy that his process as he defines it is
carried out in accordance with his wishes so he
can go to his mayor or city council to demonstrate
the success of his plan.
Meanwhile, the war goes on.
The industry has to lead the customer. One
cannot abdicate responsibility for the need
to create **at a bare minimum** some data standards.
I understand massive backplane translation.
We do it every day. It wastes money, and that
isn't a good thing except that we get the
money. But look at the recent kidnappings,
look at the serial killers, look at the rise
of terrorists attempting to enter your borders
as visa'd students and tell me that you really
think local expertise in the form of the
program is the answer to networked communications.
Code it as you will. Call it as agreed upon.
It works better. Market be dammed.
len
From: Paul Prescod [mailto:paul@prescod.net]
If you don't even *define* the schema then there is a danger that the
market won't even come into existence. Look at all of the companies
taking a wait-and-see attitude towards web services while they "wait for
standards to solidify." Once the schema exists then all of the usual
market pressures will work out the way they did before there was XML.
Sometimes the market leader defines the defacto profile. Sometimes they
follow the spec closely. Sometimes conformance testing shames them into
being strict. Sometimes they have a "strict" or "loose" flag. etc. etc.
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