Keywords: Case studies, Content Management, E-Government, Electronic Publishing
Biography
Jon Parsons has over 20 years experience automating the creation, management, and delivery of content in multiple forms. Currently he works in product marketing at XyEnterprise. Prior to that, he was a writer, editor, tools developer, and publishing consultant for a large computer manufacturer. Long an advocate of generic mark up and an enthusiast for XML, he is a regular speaker at industry events and, in the past, served a term on the Board of Directors of OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards.
Legislative processes have evolved over time to support the deliberation and decision making of legislators. Automating these processes can make important information available sooner to a broader audience of people. At the same time, the culture associated with the legislative process needs to be preserved. This case study looks at how the Florida State Senate is undertaking a major refresh of its technology, using this opportunity to automate the publishing of key documents, tying in the legislative information with the overall IT system using XML and related standards for the integration.
1. The Legislative Process and the IT Dilemma
2. The Vision
3. An Overview of What is To Be Done
4. Metrics and Learnings to Date
The process by which laws are proposed, debated, amended, and, finally, enacted or rejected has always been a fundamentally human behavior. Wherever people get together to make decisions that affect not only themselves by many others as well, politics immediately come into play. In the case of a state legislature, citizens want to know what's going on. Lobbyists strive to contact key decision makers. Concerned voters want to know who their representatives are and how to contact them to make their opinions known. Students of government all the way from elementary school on through to the university want to know not only how a bill becomes a law but are curious about the status of particular bills in that cycle and how likely they are to be enacted. Lawyers rely on committee reports and official records to determine legislative intent as they argue about how the laws that are passed should apply in hard cases.
While humans have been the focus of the legislative process from its inception, documents, records, speeches and other types of information associated with the legislative process have been kept in a variety of forms captured in a myriad of ways. All of this information has been about a well-defined, step-by-step process that is publicly documented and well known to all of its participants.
Tracking the status and progress of particular bills, co-ordinating and scheduling committee meetings, collecting the speeches made on the floor of the chambers, capturing committee decisions and the amended language that results, recording the final official roll-call votes — all of these aspects of the process have historically been the responsibility of different people with different roles and responsibilities along the way. The fact that different people have had different responsibilities and approaches, has led to capturing and processing legislative information at different times by different means.
Over the past several decades, as information technology became pervasive and universally available, managing the information associated with each aspect of the legislative process began to be automated.
The fact that automation was introduced at various points was the good news. The fact that the automation improved only narrow pieces of the full process was the bad news.
Just as in many businesses, where different IT systems designed for particular purposes were brought in to separate departments and ended up creating a set of "stovepipes" that automated particular aspects of the business without providing the ability for information to flow through from end to end, so in many legislative environments the computer platforms and applications introduced to automate pieces of the legislative process ended up creating pockets of automation.
The tools introduced to solve particular problems performed as promised, but they frequently did so with the consequence of trapping the information in proprietary formats or on platforms that could not be readily integrated into a network.
In addition, technology ages fast. Hardware vendors are eager to sell newer, faster systems. Operating systems vendors bring out new O/S versions while at the same time ceasing to support older versions. Applications vendors cannot support older configurations forever. Finally, customized solutions are not easily brought forward onto newer platforms. All of these factors add up to a strong economic incentive to step back and carefully analyze what could be done to:
The Florida State Senate has wrestled with these issues and has undertaken a deliberate and far-reaching project to:
This project is underway now, in its early phases. The prime contractor is Infinity Software Development in partnership with several other vendors supplying components to the overall solution. Among them is XyEnterprise whose Content@ content management system and XML publishing solution will be supply important contributions to the overall solution.
The key to success in this large endeavor is the use of standards and, in particular, XML and its directly related family of standards, throughout the project. The commitment to XML shapes the key characteristics of the whole approach being taken. The key requirements are:
Each of these is worth a brief discussion in turn.
The Web-centric approach was taken for two key reasons. First, remote access to the information in the system opens the possibility of delivering the content to many new classes of user. Second, the Web is seen to be developing a new cross-platform paradigm for computer interaction that is user friendly and vendor neutral. By adopting a Web-centric approach the project intends to reach the greatest possible number of end users, overcoming the barriers of geography and at least some of the obstacles of incompatible systems.
Extensibility of the system is an important requirement of the project for several reasons. One is the phased approach to be taken. The project will be done incrementally with defined deliverables along the way. It will start with a core and build out from there. Therefore, the ability to extend the features and capability of the system, adding new content and supporting new delivery methods is crucial. Another motivation for requiring extensibility is the presence of the unknown. As carefully as the information analysis has been done and as thoroughly as the existing requirements have been determined to be complete, there will no doubt be requests for further capabilities and deliverables that are today unknown. Therefore, the ability to use the existing content in new ways, along with the ability to add new types of content to the managed environment and to deliver it to end users in new forms is fundamental to the long term success of the project.
Use of best practices in IT is an important requirement because a major goal of the project is to bring two worlds together. These two worlds are the publishing world, where the focus has historically been on collecting, formatting, and publishing text content (generally to paper or an electronic form of paper) and the IT world where the focus has been on the collection and manipulation of data, generally strongly typed information stored in databases. While one world has focused on formatting and presentation of free-form text, the other has focused on the storage and reporting of facts.
The convergence of these two world has been made possible by the common adoption of XML for both publishing technology and for general IT purposes to support businesses of all types. This convergence is also occurring in the governmental realm, in particular in support of the legislative process. Because of it, the Florida Senate is now taking an integrated approach, bringing together applications dedicated to capturing and publishing information about the status of legislation with systems formerly considered to be "in-house" business systems for the management of the day to day operation of the Senate and its staff.
These two types of software and these two cultures will be integrated together and enabled to share information through a set of standards based on XML. Following a common core of IT best practices as well as adopting XML as the standard for both content mark-up and communications between applications will enable the integration of publishing and information management to be achieved.
Attention to simple interfaces for end users is an important requirement both because the people who will be using the system in-house (Senate members and staff), as well as people accessing the Web portal for information, will not generally be experienced technical users. Therefore there is a strong requirement to supply focused, task-oriented choices that grow out of what the user is trying to do. This requirement sets a high bar on usability for each occasion a user makes use of the system.
The phased approach to implementing and rolling out the project grows directly out of the scale and complexity of what is being taken on. The legislative process is complicated in and of itself. The information required to document the life cycle of a particular bill takes many forms. Then, add to that the challenge of managing the day-to-day information for coordinating staff, tracking the schedules of legislators, supporting contacts with the press and constituents, etc. To keep the project manageable and to ensure that it stays in scope requires a very clear focus on one area at a time. Once success is achieved for a focused deliverable, then a new area can be addressed and added. The deliberate, phased nature of the project reduces the number of variables and helps to ensure the long-term success of the entire effort.
The Florida State Senate project will address the total legislative process. Some of the publishing-oriented functions to be automated include:
The full scope of the project extends over the next several years but one of the first phases to be delivered next year starts with basic publications that were traditionally paper based, including:
Along with these some of the online publications to be addressed in the first phase of the project are:
This multi-year project is just getting started and it is too early to report results from implemented production systems. However it is already clear that several conclusions can be drawn.
First and foremost is the importance of keeping a continual focus on the business rationale of what is being undertaken. The Senate is undertaking this project to realize a return on its investment in several ways. These are the touchstones on which success or failure will be measured:
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