Connecting the Dots

Executive summary ii EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The primary goal of this thesis is to consider how recommendations and standards for Danish IT architecture, in general, assure successful systems integration, leading to inter-operability in the Danish public sector. The secondary goal is to assess the specific case of integrating ECM (ESDH) systems from the FESD project with existing systems from KMD in the context of Danish municipalities. Danish IT policy states interoperability as its main objective for IT architecture work. After examining the concepts of architecture, interoperability and integration, and studying the case, we conclude on the current situation in terms of how mature the Danish work on IT architecture is. ƒ Both the general standards and recommendations and the specific case of the FESD project reflect an understanding of interoperability as being the exchange of business documents. ƒ Guidance on how to expose systems as services following the concept of service oriented architecture is vague at best. Specifications are too broad and unspecific to be implemented in a consistent manner. ƒ There is no coherent way of resolving the physical or semantic problems when two domains of control meet. ƒ Most relevant standards are authorized for use, some overlapping and conflicting, but no guidelines are in place for when to use which standards and how. ƒ Towards the goal of service oriented architecture, a sound underlying, perhaps publicly controlled, integration infrastructure is needed. ƒ There is a need for a long-term roadmap covering IT architectural efforts in the decades to come. The roadmap should clearly describe the current IT architectural situation, and include an explicit statement of strategic goals and operationalized milestones. While important work is being done at data model level, the task of moving data from application to application is only vaguely described. In conclusion, Danish IT architectural work can currently best be described as initial, informal and ad-hoc.