Page 63 - GAO-02-327 Electronic Government: Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language

Chapter 4: Conclusions and Recommendations

incompatible data formats and standards will proliferate and prevent
agencies from being able to take full advantage of XML to substantially
improve governmentwide data sharing.

The federal government, which is committed to adopting commercial
standards wherever possible, still has the opportunity to have its needs
considered in the process of developing these standards. However, federal
requirements have not yet been identified and consolidated so that they
can be clearly communicated to the standards bodies that are currently at
work on XML business standards.

Given that XML is still in the early stages of its development and
implementation, a top down strategy of predefining XML data structures
and designating specific commercial standards, such as ebXML, as
universal solutions for addressing interoperability is not likely to be
effective. Instead, to be effective, the government’s strategy must balance
top down guidance with bottom up incentives that encourage agency
initiative and provide leeway for agencies to develop implementations that
best meet their needs. Specifically, establishing an operational registry for
XML data elements and structures with incentives for agencies to make
use of it could encourage a bottom up development of de facto standards.
As elements of a government XML vocabulary became standardized
through this registry on a de facto basis, the government would be in a
better position at a later date to revisit the question of what commercial
standards and vocabularies to officially endorse. The XML Working Group
is developing a pilot registry along these lines, but it is not yet operational
and lacks an agreed-upon set of policies and guidelines to promote the
broadest possible use.

XML’s larger promise of facilitating data exchange across broad domains
(such as an entire agency, a group of agencies, or a set of external
stakeholders and client organizations) will be difficult to realize until
critical data elements and structures are identified and standardized
across entire agencies and communities of interest. This task of identifying
and standardizing critical data elements and structures is part of an
agency’s larger task of developing an enterprise architecture. Well-planned
enterprise architectures can also promote the adoption of flexible
implementations that can be modified in the future to conform to
commercial standards that become established over time. Thus, agency
enterprise architectures are key building blocks to effective
governmentwide adoption of XML.

Page 59 GAO-02-327 Electronic Government