Building Information Interoperability

Last week, I visited Washington State where I spoke and met with some folks at Microsoft’s Worldwide Justice and Public Safety Symposium. I focused on some key points related to building information interoperability that I would like to share here.

What is information interoperability?

Essentially, interoperability is the technical implementation of responsible information sharing between Information Sharing Environment partners. Standards are a big component of this, which is why we are actively engaging with groups such as the Object Management Group, Open Geospatial Consortium, IJIS Institute, and many others to coordinate the development, issuance, and certification of standards. A robust and successful ISE requires consistent best practices developed through a consensus process with industry, not continuing to develop unique, ad hoc standards for different government projects. This approach provides consistency across development efforts that increases productivity, supports greater innovation, and reduces risk.

But information interoperability is much more. Public and private partners must agree on which standards should be part of those consistent best practices. We are working with GSA and OMB, as well as industry groups like ACT/IAC and others, to develop recommendations for training and approaches to better leverage existing policy tools to promote these standards. Through events such as the Symposium, we are engaging with industry to help foster incorporation of standards such as the NIEM UML Profile into development tools.

Finally, the appropriate policies need to be in place to enforce the use of standards. Interoperability integrates all of these components: standards, common vocabularies, training, reusable contract language, and policies and guidelines.

A community and opportunities for feedback

Meeting with industry and standards development organizations is an important opportunity for feedback and to develop important consensus around standards, but this is only one step in building interoperability. We look forward to continuing to build a robust information sharing community through meetings and conferences, as well as online. We’re looking for your feedback – please comment below, start a discussion with us on Twitter, send us an email, and keep an eye out for our upcoming LinkedIn group.