Page 13 - GAO-02-327 Electronic Government: Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language

Executive Summary

technology’s promise of facilitating broad interoperability among disparate
systems.

Recommendations for Given the statutory responsibility of OMB to develop and oversee
governmentwide policies and guidelines for agency IT management, we
Executive Action recommend that the director of OMB, working in concert with the federal

CIO Council and NIST, develop a strategy for governmentwide adoption of
XML to guide agency implementation efforts and ensure that the
technology is addressed in agency enterprise architectures. This strategy
should, at a minimum, address how the federal government will address
the following tasks:

• Developing a process with defined roles, responsibilities, and
accountability for identifying and coordinating government-unique
requirements and presenting consolidated, focused input to private sector
standards-setting bodies during the development of XML standards. This
process could be patterned after the current process that is in place for
EDI coordination among federal agencies, or OMB might consider
adapting the EDI process to cover XML as well. Guiding the overall
process should be the presumption that mature, agreed-upon commercial
standards will be adopted by the government whenever possible.
• Developing a project plan for transitioning the CIO Council’s pilot XML
registry effort into an operational governmentwide resource. This plan
should include identifying time frames and resources needed to implement
and maintain an operational registry linked to agency repositories of
standard data structures.
• Setting policies and guidelines for managing and participating in the
governmentwide XML registry, once it is operational, to ensure its
effectiveness in promoting data sharing capabilities among federal
agencies. These policies should clarify the roles and responsibilities of
specific agencies and should consider including definitions of classes of
compliance, which could be used to categorize how rigorously
organizations adhere to the policies. Further, these policies should
promote the consistent use of XML namespaces to resolve potential
ambiguity in data references across XML documents.

In addition, as part of its ongoing process for reviewing agency IT
architectures and annual budget requests, we recommend that OMB
ensure that agencies’ business needs for XML technology are defined in
their enterprise architectures. Specifically, OMB should specify
requirements for documenting the usage of XML standards and products

Page 9 GAO-02-327 Electronic Government