Having thought about the Treasury briefing for a week or so, I now realise that something was missing.   That something was an explanation of how Treasury thinks their project fits into their bigger picture of how they think government works.

You can see what I mean, in the following diagram, adapted from S.L.Hodgkinson, “The Role of the Corporate IT Function in the Federal IT Organization” (1996) .   The talk showed no comprehension of the “Federated” concept.  Instead we are still talking in terms of “Centralised” and “Decentralised”.  The 1980s reform moved us towards the “Decentralised” model, and now the economic crisis starts the pendulum swing back the other way.

The Role of the Corporate Function in the Federal Organisation

The diagram came about as part of my work for the State Services Commission, on a Government Federated Enterprise Architecture.   Our work closely followed similar government enterprise architecture  initiatives in the US, UK, Canada and Australia.  They are focussed on:

• Providing a common language for agencies involved in the delivery of cross-agency services;
• Supporting the identification of duplicate, re-usable and sharable services;
• Providing a basis for the objective review of investment by government; and
• Enabling more cost-effective and timely delivery of services through a repository of standards, principles and templates that assist in the design and delivery of capability and, in turn, business services to citizens.

As an interesting side note – look who runs the government enterprise architecture initiatives:

• US – Office of Management and Budget
• Canada – Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
• Australia – Department of Finance and Deregulation

I hope that the Treasury picks up on this previous work done by the State Services Commission, and starts to include discussion of federated architecture.   Our work had already gone further than other jurisdictions, by using previous NZ e-government initiatives (SONZ, FONZ) and had identified the need for performance measurement and benchmarking.