Page 12 - GAO-02-327 Electronic Government: Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language

Executive Summary

has been limited to the activities of the XML Working Group, chartered by
the federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council. The working group’s
activities have focused on education and outreach rather than developing
a strategy for adopting XML. Without agreement on a governmentwide
implementation strategy, agencies risk building and buying systems that
will not work with each other in the future.

The federal government as a whole has neither identified cross-agency and
governmentwide requirements for XML nor developed a dictionary of
inherently governmental data tags and definitions. Further, no process has
been defined for consolidated collaboration with commercial standards
bodies to ensure that government requirements are identified and
incorporated. Past experience coordinating federal requirements for EDI
suggests that an effective approach is to task a central committee with
collecting requirements from federal agencies and representing the
government on key standards groups.

Given that it is challenging to agree upon predefined XML vocabularies,
other approaches can be adopted to encourage broad, consistent use of
data definitions and structures. Specifically, a “bottom up” approach is to
establish a centralized registry of key XML data elements and structures
and coordinate its use by XML systems developers. With this arrangement,
developers have the incentive to reuse data structures found in the registry
because doing so reduces costs and brings about interoperability with
other existing systems. The federal XML Working Group, chartered by the
CIO Council, is working to create a pilot version of a governmentwide
registry, based on a registry previously developed by the Defense Logistics
Agency. However, further work will be needed to set policies and
guidelines to ensure the effectiveness of the registry in promoting
governmentwide systems interoperability.

Another avenue for promoting interoperability is to ensure that sound
XML implementation strategies are adopted and documented on an
agency-by-agency basis through development of enterprise architectures.
Effective XML implementation depends on complete and well-established
data definitions and structures, which can be best obtained through the
process of defining and adopting an enterprise architecture. Such an
architecture provides the foundation for maximizing XML’s benefits and
forestalling costly future reworking of agency systems.

If these challenges are not addressed, the use of XML in the federal
government may have only limited benefits and may not achieve the

Page 8 GAO-02-327 Electronic Government