[egov] Best Practice Sub-committee

[Paul Spencer <paul.spencer@boynings.co.uk>]

John,

cc: e-Gov TC for comments

My thoughts are as follows:

We need to document best practice in various areas of e-Government.
Different circumstances might call for different practices, so we need to
give reasons and circumstances where each apply.

I would do this through the use of annotated case studies. We would ask for
case studies we can use - the UK might contribute the e-GIF, IR's project
Dogfood, the Sedgemoor Local Authority project, the Govt Gateway, the e-GMS
etc. Each of these should identify what specifics make this good practice
and learning points - what we would do differently next time. Once we have
several we believe are good practice, we can categorise them and look at why
different projects in the same category have taken different approaches. For
example, why does the UK nationally only provide common semantics for a few
elements (the Data Standards Catalogue), while others hold a central
repository of all XML definitions used? If the reason is different
circumstances, both might be best practice. If the circumstances are similar
and one approach appears more successful than the other, this is best
practice.

We can then look at whether the actual practice could be improved. If we do
this, it needs to be based on experience more than theory - solutions need
to stay pragmatic. But perhaps we don't even need to do that. If we could
say "these are currently the world's twenty best [local authority | e-gov
framework | etc] projects, the environment that drove their development, why
they were successful and what the original owners would do differently next
time", people could draw their own conclusions.

Is this roughly in line with what you were thinking?

Regards

Paul Spencer
Senior Partner
Boynings Consulting
http://www.boynings.co.uk