Monday, March 10, 2003

e-Envoy Takes a Hit An article in the Independent (via Voxpolitics) says that the Office of the e-Envoy is about to be cut dramatically.  What a shame.  I hope that Alan Mathers will continue his evangelization of eGovernment, regardless of whether he stays with the e-Envoy or moves on to something else.  Alan responds to concerns raised over eGov adoption rates, That doesn't mean that I don't take ownership of the lack of usage. I do. And I'll work to change that, however the budget round comes out and however many people are in OeE - the vast bulk of the work that OeE needs to do now, having established policies and so on, is influence the decision makers in goverment into doing the right thing. 8:38:45 AM    comment []

Web Services and Chronic Wasting Disease An article in NW Fusion discusses a State of Colorado web services app that is used to track 160 domestic elk herds throughout the state.  Some of the elk are suffering from Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD).  The elk is Utah's state animal.  The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources has been testing for CWD for several years, particularly along the Colorado border and has tested about 1,500 elk.  Recently, a sample from a mature buck north of Vernal, Utah, came back positive. The [Colorado] Web service uses SOAP and WSDL and includes hooks for UDDI, although that technology is not used currently. It has a Web portal front end that each division uses to access the database through a browser. The front end uses SOAP messages to trigger Web services that make XML-based procedure calls, such as "input data" or "run reports," into a Microsoft SQL database. A quote from the manager of Colorado's application, "Government agencies have all this iron sitting around and apps that are 15 years old.  And since the days of decent IT budgets are long past, let's keep this stuff up for a few more years, throw on a little different way we are going to access it, [such as] XML, and keep running. What people need to figure out is that they should consider Web services their gateway." Web services is a great way to add new functionality to existing applications.  We need more government agencies who understand how to use it. Utah elk distribution map 7:56:25 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 David Fletcher.