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Tying a Sensible Knot: A Practical Guide to State-Local Information Systems

Abstract

Acknowledgments

Executive Summary

Chapter 1. Understanding the State-Local Environment

Chapter 2. Principles for Working in the State-Local Environment

Chapter 3. Best Practices

Appendices
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Chapter 3. Best Practices

Use industry standard technology

In our world of rapidly evolving technologies, there are many different options. Before making selections, it is a good idea to investigate current technical standards and to develop an awareness of what products support the standards. If you purchase technology that does not support current or developing standards, chances are good it will not be able to integrate with other products.

Industry standards exist for almost every type of hardware, software, and communications technology, including such things as data organization and access (e.g. database structure, query languages), data interchange (e.g. Electronic Data Interchange, encryption), networking services (e.g. data communications, network management, e-mail), and document imaging (e.g. scanning, imaging, workflow). In some cases, these standards are developed through the efforts of a formal national or international committee. In other cases, because of market share, a certain vendor’s approach becomes the de facto standard.

Standards enable interoperability and electronic messaging among system components. They also offer vendor independence and scalability - when you use a common standard, you will be able to choose among different products that adhere to the standard and will be able to scale up to larger systems when the need arises. You can become familiar with the appropriate standards for any given application through discussions with experienced colleagues, talking to vendors, reading trade journals and other literature, and by searching the Internet. New York State has established preferred standards for many technologies through the efforts of working groups sponsored by the Governor’s Task Force on Information Resource Management.


Social Services Imaging Project: Images of success

When considering technical options for the development of its Local DSS Imaging project, the New York State Department of Social Services was faced with a dilemma: try to build a system that would run on as few platforms as possible to reduce support and maintenance problems or try to accommodate the diverse hardware and software base of its large user community. The team understood the inherent difficulties of trying to develop and maintain different versions of a system that would run on multiple platforms at the local level - the numerous idiosyncrasies of different software, operating systems, and hardware would make it extremely difficult to design and support the system. However, the team also understood that local agencies need to integrate new systems into their existing computing environments and would have a tough time convincing their management to accept a system that was not compatible with existing hardware and software. The problem was how to build a system that would take advantage of the best technology while at the same time avoid the possibility that it would become an orphan in the local government’s larger systems environment.

As a solution to the problem, the team decided to develop a system that would be compliant with as many mainstream hardware and software standards as possible. This would ensure that the system components would integrate with one another, and greatly increase the potential longevity of the system by providing an upgrade path that would allow for the integration of evolving technologies that used the same industry standards. Local users were happy with this solution because they knew that they would not be receiving a system built with outdated or proprietary components. For those not yet following the mainstream, this was also an incentive to begin to move toward standard technologies that would enable them to adopt new tools and enhancements more readily in the future.


Electronic Voter Registration: The right standard at the right price

The Electronic Voter Registration project team was faced with a challenging task: the seamless communication of information among disparate computer systems employed by the State Board of Election, the local Boards of Election, and the State Departments of Health and Motor Vehicles. While employing Electronic Data Interchange to handle the application-related interface issues, the project team originally expected to use Value Added Networks (VANS) to actually transport the transaction records from one computer to another. Under this traditional method, companies lease lines into a central site supported by a for-profit VAN. The VAN transfers records from a client which is sending EDI transactions to the intended recipient. Both the client and recipient must be members of the VAN and the service charges are considerable. During the project, the team wondered whether the standard TCP/IP protocol of the Internet might be employed as a replacement for VANs. The team was able to demonstrate that such a system could be developed using electronic mail and the MIME protocol along with standard encryption methods. The result was a workable solution which used emerging world-wide technical standards to accomplish their goals at reduced costs.

"Technical standards offer interoperability, scalability, and vendor independence."