SWOT Analysis

- Opportunities -

SWOT Analysis Opportunities

As it becomes apparent there are many areas of interest where technical interoperability is a strong demand and can be seen as a great opportunity. These areas include confidentiality, trustworthiness, ubiquity of services, information access and management, human-computer interaction, middleware, security, organizational and social issues, large scale systems, software technology, etc. Some obvious technical issues that will be considered, amongst others, include:
Reusability: Technically interoperable solutions, or at least some of their modules, are reusable by other applications. Portability: Technical interoperability has an immediate descendant or consequence of being independent from hardware and software platforms. Portability helps the reusability of developed interoperable solutions.

SWOT Analysis Opportunities

Flexibility
Connectivity and interoperation among computers, among entities (governments, businesses, citizens, and individuals), and among software components can increase the flexibility and agility of ICT systems, thus reducing administrative and software costs for government. They may also reduce the time needed to implement software applications and services. Flexibility issues can be examined in two contexts:
At the national level, flexibility and agility may be increased as interoperability increases. Interoperability can, for instance, assist in the delivery of e-Government services and help the business sector interact electronically with administrations, reducing administrative costs burden and encouraging SMEs to go digital. At the European level, interoperability supports the Single Market and its associated four freedoms of movement of people, capital, goods and services.

SWOT Analysis Opportunities

Integration
Technical standards are being developed through open processes, and their adoption is being driven by the pressure software companies to meet their customers requirements for standards adherence. Standards and interoperability work best when processes are loosely coupled. The problems of interoperability are neither unique nor new. The interoperability problems of integrating disparate databases, distributed networks, e-procurement solutions, B2B data exchanges, enterprise application integration, portal integration, B2C (consumer/citizen) solutions, mobile communications, and others all exist in private industry as well as the public sector. In general, there is a common need across all industries for research, new technologies, and improved standards to address interoperability.

SWOT Analysis Opportunities Open Standards5

ICT industry experience is that best of breed solutions, regardless of the business or development model but evaluated on the basis of the best value for the money.
provide the best functionality mix, support interoperability between components through their compatibility with open standards, and ensure continual upgrades, software support and expertise.

Open standards compatibility should be a major selection criterion for software to ensure its interoperability,
it should be recognized that open standards may evolve quickly and preferences for any open standard or versions of open standards, including OSS-style open standards, should be avoided to preserve the utmost flexibility in a best value assessment of technology and solutions for administration interaction and business problems.

SWOT Analysis Opportunities

Private/public multi-stakeholder partnerships6
The best approach to achieve and ensure interoperability is by the public sector partnering with the private sector, in particular the ICT industry. Without partnering with the private sector, several risks may appear: The risk of adopting technologies and standards that become outdated and unsupported over time. The risk of not being able to rapidly take advantage of technology advances and business process improvements that private industry develops. The risk of adopting standards that do not interoperate between the private and public sectors (e.g., privacy standards, security certification standards). For this reason, governmental efforts and projects should work in close cooperation with international standards bodies such as OASIS and W3C. Standardization and frameworks within governments, such as the EIF, e-GIF, etc., plus direct involvement in international standardization efforts, such as those of the W3C, OASIS, and others, and working with regional intermediaries, are essential to assure interoperability.

SWOT Analysis Opportunities

Motives for standardization bodies and governments7 In many cases, market parties will not themselves arrive at adequate solutions in the area of technical interoperability. This means that a role is reserved for various other actors who can contribute in their own ways to solving the problem, within their scope, responsibilities and limits. The main interest lies on (national) government and standardization bodies, but the European Union and other organizations can also contribute.

SWOT Analysis Opportunities

Rewriting vs. reusing Many companies wish to continue using their existing legacy applications. Sometimes the cost and disruption involved in rewriting these applications would outweigh any benefit. In general, this is a common threat. Most companies are not interested in throwing code away. But there are times when it makes better sense to let go of the old systems and rewrite them from scratch. One reason for rewriting is when the application is tied to an archaic module (e.g. database).

SWOT Analysis Opportunities

Economical issues In addition to technical benefits, technical interoperability provides tangible business value in reduced overall expenses. In the long term, at least two areas of cost savings can be seen: personnel costs and hardware costs. Naturally, this can be seen in line with other parameters such as reusability, portability, expandability and flexibility of the applications developed.

Further Investigations

Open Standardsv
A major contributor to interoperability is voluntary open standards development plus voluntary open standards adoption. Open standards development, without significant adoption of the resultant standards, does nothing in the effort to achieve interoperability. Standards, like software, must evolve to take advantage of technology advances. Best-ofbreed solutions, evaluated on a best value for money basis, that are continually updated and have software support to meet customer standards-compatibility expectations are the best approach to achieve and ensure ongoing interoperability. Governments, through their procurement, research, and policies, should support and encourage the efforts of the ICT industry to voluntarily develop, adopt and promote open standards. Applications developed should fully leverage the competitive marketplace to reach interoperability. The ICT industry has devoted considerable resources towards voluntarily defining, and changing hardware and software to adhere to open technology standards. Government, through its procurement, research, and ICT policies should support these efforts and fully utilize them to reach interoperability. Cost effective, open-standards compatible hardware and software, where the underlying standards have been widely adopted, is an enabler of interoperability. Open-standards compatible software can be developed using any software development model, and can be licensed under a variety of business models. Open source does not mean or imply open standard or compatibility with open standards, and vice-versa, as open standards may be implemented by software developed under any business or development model. Open source is not a standard or set of standards, but instead simply software whose code is publicly available. Nothing in and of it ensures that OSS is interoperable, even with other OSS programs. For instance, the freedom to modify OSS code necessarily provides the ability to change the code in ways that may undermine a programs ability to interoperate with other programs and devices. Beyond open standards compatibility, general business requirements, functionality requirements, total cost of ownership, and other elements of a best value for money evaluation should drive the selection of software, not how the software was developed or is licensed. Looking to this issue from a merely technical point of view, it is evident that successful implementations and emerging normative standards from Europe and central governments

make an extensive reference to the W3C Recommendations. In fact, applications conformant with the basic W3C goals (universal access, semantic web, web of trust) and design requirements, like interoperability and decentralization, are perfectly in line with the present and future requirements of applications. In fact, technical interoperability, portability, accessibility are just a consequence of conforming to W3C Recommendations, and any existing application conformant to these standards will conform to emerging regulations with little or no effort. Therefore, being active actors in developing web technologies can be an excellent opportunity to be competitive in the market. Even more important, moving without taking into account what is going on in the field, can result in a tremendous waste of resources.

The document is part of QualiPSo Deliverable D3.1.1b Technical Interoperability: Report about Important Issues, Requirements and State-of-the-Art , pages 52-53.

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Private/public multi-stakeholder partnershipsvi

Many of the interoperability hurdles the public sector faces are the same as, or very similar to, the hurdles private sector companies face, but some distinct differences do exist. In particular, many governmental business processes are closely tied to legislation, regulations, and court findings. Process improvement and data semantics resolution frequently requires revision to the underlying legislation or regulations. The European Unions coordinated approach facilitates such legislative and regulatory changes. Nevertheless, governmental services/business process owners must aggressively pursue change to affect it even within the context of the EU. European Commission states that there is a need for commitment at all levels for interoperability to happen (i.e. global and international, European, national, regional and local) and there is a need to ensure that consequential adjustment of European or national policies occur. Through greater interoperability, large improvements in EU intra-Government and interGovernment services are possible. Additionally, from the private industry perspective, improved interoperability with the private sector and citizens/consumers could, and should, be a major source of business process/services improvement. Many of the business process improvements made in the private sector over the last decade or so have been accomplished by companies working with their customers and suppliers (the extended enterprise) to streamline their supply chains. Information flow, as well as the flow of physical goods/services, from supplier to government and, in many cases, from government to citizen/consumer, could be streamlined through similar extended enterprise efforts. There is a plethora of commercial software available to support such business-tobusiness exchange of data. Similar to private industry, these extended enterprise efforts would result in more customer-centric, citizen-friendly, governmental enterprises. Public sector software must meet governmental business requirements. The public sector faces many of the same decisions that private industry does in deciding whether to acquire or build software. Governmental entities, like private companies, vary in size and business requirements, both of which affect ICT software and hardware selection. Like private industry, in some cases governments should allow software to drive process, while in other cases, governments should have process drive software. Also like private industry, software applications may be developed in a variety of ways, and offered under many different types of licenses. In almost all cases, software and hardware acquisition costs are merely a part of the overall total costs of ownership (TCO) interoperability and cost elements such as training have become major parts of the cost equation. In the

competitive environment, ICT companies offering open standards compatible proprietary software solutions have strong incentives to deliver robust functionality and open standards based interoperability to meet customer requirements and sell their products.

The document is part of QualiPSo Deliverable D3.1.1b Technical Interoperability: Report about Important Issues, Requirements and State-of-the-Art , pages 53-54.

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Motives for standardization bodies and governmentsvii

a) Motives for standardization bodies An important motive for standardization bodies to contribute to technical interoperability solutions is to enhance the attractiveness of their activities to their members. Focused efforts in the area of interoperability enhance the utility of standards to members. In addition, the risk of deadlocks declines (the situation in which a standard gains little popularity and early adopters are faced with large changeover costs). The body also becomes more attractive to its members if specific expertise in this area is built up and exchanged. A second motive is that of the organizations image relative to other organizations. In a certain respect the typical telecommunications market is becoming less attractive now that bandwidth is increasingly becoming a commodity. The added value is shifting more and more to higher layers in the chain. Standardization bodies find it more attractive to focus on functions which add a lot of value. A third motive now that the time of system standards is past and systems are increasingly made up from a box of protocols is that demand for interoperability is expected to increase. The required gateways/converters, middleware and APIs will become markets in themselves. More and more standardization bodies, forums and consortia are busy producing these building blocks. Coordination between the various building blocks is becoming more and more important. A role for a kind of standards integrator is thus coming into being. Interoperability questions are a central element in this. A fourth motive is that interoperability is becoming increasingly pivotal in the regulatory framework. Efforts in that area result in a good link to the European and national regulators. Finally, ways of achieving innovativeness and work on break-through technologies (including disrupting technologies) are increasing. It is simpler to devote attention to such developments if one is not repeatedly faced with the nuisance of the undesirable consequences of fragmentation as a result of the introduction of new technologies. b) Motives for national governments An important motive for national governments to contribute, or have others contribute, to interoperability is linked to the so-called network effect. This is a phenomenon whereby the attractiveness of some services, such as telephony services, increases with the number of

consumers who take the service. Large networks are thus attractive, but value can also be created by linking (large and small) networks. If, for example, a mobile telephony network is still small, if it has interconnection with all the other fixed and mobile telephony networks the user can nevertheless reach all the other telephone users and the value of the network is high. This is commonly called a gateway or, if modifications are needed, an adapter. It goes without saying that it is in the public interest to maximize the value of telecommunications networks and services to end-users, and hence to encourage interconnection and interconnectivity. Precisely now that all kinds of new fixed and networks are being created, it is important to link these new systems to the existing networks as far as possible, in order to maximize their value to the end-users. A second motive for governments to take action to promote (technical) interoperability is that a lack of ways to link networks can result in undesirable organization of the market. If networks are not (or cannot be) linked, this strengthens the dominant position of large, existing parties. The desired competitive market will not then come into being. The absence of technical compatibility options can be seized on by parties with substantial market power to evade access obligations. In other words, access obligations are of little effect if the technical potential for interoperability is lacking. The third motive concerns the desire for a technology-neutral policy. Policymakers are becoming increasingly convinced that policy support for certain technologies is a risky approach, requiring that the winners be identified in advance. In practice this turns out to be difficult, certainly for a government. In addition, the consequences of wrong choices are great (one has only to think of the European initiatives for high-definition television). Finally, some important aspects should be also considered: Interoperability can be helpful in relation to launching application areas that governments consider important, such as e-Government. In this context one thinks of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and the IDA eLink middleware design. Areas such as e-health and e-learning are also highly important. The concept of interoperability fits well into present European regulation. The degree to which technical standards operate as a barrier to access to markets often plays a part in international trade agreements. A high degree of interoperability can partly eliminate this source of friction.
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The document is part of QualiPSo Deliverable D3.1.1b Technical Interoperability: Report about Important Issues, Requirements and State-of-the-Art , pages 54-56.

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