Thursday, March 13, 2003

Health Care Emergency Preparedness The Joint Commission has developed a report entitled, "Health Care at the Crossroads: Strategies for Creating and Sustaining Community-wide Emergency Preparedness Systems."  The report makes a number of specific recommendations for state governments, some of which relate to the development and maintenance of web-based services. 7:54:26 AM    comment []

Identity Management Yesterday, Dave McNamee shared a presentation with the State's IT community on the use of eDirectory and the Utah Master Director (UMD) in supporting the development of online employee and citizen services.  A common question was "Why do I need this? or "This is a solution looking for a problem."  Actually, it is a response to a question raised by Governor Leavitt in his quest to make citizen services more customer friendly.  Governor Leavitt has had a vision that was first presented in 1993 in his "Electronic Highway" speech of seamless online government that responds to customer needs in a citizen-centric kind of way and which was reiterated in his challenge to explore enterprise level solutions.  "Oh yeah?" some ask, "we need that directory information is our applications so that it can perform essential processes."  That is where an understanding of XML, web services, etc. becomes necessary.  I do not suggest that we do an overnight overhaul of existing applications to bring them into the context of new technologies and services, but as new applications are developed or existing applications are modified, these are things which should be considered.  I would like Dave to create a product-specific webpage for UMD and other authentication services that not only shares information about what the service is and how it works, but with specific ideas of how it is being used and how it might be used in the future so that agencies can better respond with the business requirements that they have for the product.  ITS created this demo of UMD's predecessor (the State Employee Enterprise Database or SEED). During his presentation, Dave made an important commitment which was to monitor developments with Liberty Alliance, SAML, and other related industry standards and support them with his UMD/eDirectory work whenever it makes sense.  Dave does maintain a category on his weblog specifically dedicated to the topic of directory services. 7:14:37 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 David Fletcher.