X-orad is open-source software and ecosystem solution that provides unified and secure data exchange between organisations. It facilitates reliably techno-organisational federation of trust. Distributed collaborative information exchange network is not only a technological, but also a political matter. What technology can deliver is to ease the building of trust and creating an ecosystem of collaborative partners with shared common interest.
X-road achieves this via common trust principles, architecture and easy-to-follow technical solution. It is, however, important that the ecosystem has a leader (eg a digital agency of the country), which is taking the lead role of deploying and maintaining, facilitating the ecosystem, and very importantly - supports the onboarding of new members to the ecosystem. This role is both technical as well as organisational, such as enforcing the technical requirements. Such ecosystems will benefit its members once there is critical mass of services facilitated via common trust layer. This is why there needs to be a longer vision for eGovernment. If you only think of the first few agencies and services, the benefits of such ecosystem are not obvious. But when you need to have 10 to 15 different government services even for a larger city, you have 14 integrations less and only one security practices used by different agencies instead of 10. A government CIO may easily have 3000 information systems in government portfolio and with point to point integrations requires to monitor and maintain the security policy enforcement of tens of thousands interactions. An ecosystem approach will become a huge cost saviour very quickly. Starting the ecosystem is the most difficult moment. It requires the CIO's vision for such an ecosystem and policy/political level support to overcome the initial inertia by the individual system owners and their vendors to replace what's built previously with the new unknown solution that was not invented here. So, a good start would be to envisage 50 services in three years that could be scaled to thousand services in five years. Comparing alternative approaches to enable this exponential growth might reveal the advantages of X-road quite quickly. Once the critical mass of services have been deployed within the ecosystem, it is much easier for everyone to understand its huge benefits at the system and whole government level. The ecosystem is also more important than the technology it uses at any given point in time. You can and must change the technology and even the technical protocol, but maintain the concept, which is most valuable. And vice versa - no technology alone can substitute for the trust embedded in collaborative ecosystem culture. Plus, X-road model has proven some core conceptual techno-organisational principles to stand the test of time over 20 years. The legal side of eGovernment is also very important. To ease and complicate the implementation of efficient eGovernment the regulations should enforce the policy hat reducing administrative overhead is a goal in its own right: data usage between agencies, oversight of technological risks and future financial burden etc. Very notable feature of X-road is that it facilitates the same benefits of transparent and effective information collaboration with private sector entities as it does between government agencies. This dramatically increases the flexibility of creating public services in collaboration with private sector, while maintaining the same principles of trust. X-road is 20% of software and 80% of its "consequences", meaning that it gives the flexibility to set up very different configurations for one's ecosystem, but get an assurance of its robust security and effective collaboration capabilities that are resilient over time. From techno-legal point of view X-road provides the non repudiation of messages so that you actually get log files with evidence value that can be utilized even in court cases. By today it is also important to know that the global ecosystem of engineers knowledgeable and experienced with X-road principles and technical deployment is broad: 21 ecosystems, 132 countries, 2600 individual members supporting services for 250 million citizens already and counting. |