PROBLEMS WITH NON-OPEN DATA STANDARDS

IN SWEDISH MUNICIPALS

When Integrating and Adopting Systems

Benneth Christiansson

Department of Systems Analysis, Karlstad University, 651 88 Karlstad, Sweden

Fredrik Svensson

Redpill AB, Inova Science Park, 656 34 Karlstad, Sweden

Keywords: Open Data Standards, Systems integration.

Abstract: Governments world-wide are applying information and communication technology in order to meet a broad

range of citizen and organizational needs. When planning systems integration the choice should lead to the

software that best suits the organizational needs, taking into account price, quality, ease of use, support,

reliability, security and other characteristics considered important. This paper is based on experiences from

the KOMpiere project which aims at modifying the open source licensed ERP-system Compiere for use in

Swedish municipals. The overall goal of the project is to support and enhance the use of open source

licensed software in the Swedish public sector and thereby enable municipals to lower their IT-related costs

and gain strategic control over their own IT-environment. We discovered that at least some Swedish

municipals don’t have free access to the data they are appointed to govern and protect. The software

vendors have, by using non-open data standards, excluded the municipals from using their own data freely.

Thereby denying Swedish municipals an open market. We have in this paper suggested the creation and

usage of XML-based ODS for all systems in Swedish municipals.

1 INTRODUCTION

Governments world-wide are applying information

and communication technology in order to meet a

broad range of citizen and organizational needs.

With a complex infrastructure of technology

solutions and vendors, it is typical that government

solutions incorporate a range of technologies from

proprietary legacy solutions, commercial off the

shelf products and open source software (OSS).

When planning systems integration the choice

should lead to the software that best suits the

organizational needs, taking into account price,

quality, ease of use, support, reliability, security and

other characteristics considered important. In

general, these decisions are the same for both

government and industry.

In recent years, the free software and open

source model has established itself as a viable

alternative to other development models. Many

popular products, such as Linux, Apache and

Samba, have been created according to open source

practices, and the number of free software

applications is increasing steadily (Michlmayr et al.,

2006; Woods & Guliani, 2005). From a broader

business perspective, several innovative business

models and new business opportunities have emer-

ged as a result of the OSS phenomenon, and many

organizations have begun to capitalize on this. In

terms of competitiveness, the OSS phenomenon has

created a new service market for commercial enter-

prises to exploit and there are several examples

whereby these companies have innovatively forged

competitive advantage. Since purchase price and

license fees are not a factor, OSS companies have to

compete predominantly in terms of customer service

(St. Laurent, 2004). Since OSS counters the trend

towards proprietary monopolies, the OSS model

inherently promotes competitiveness and an open

market (ibid.).

Open Source Software and Open Data

Standards (ODS) are getting to be more and more

264

Christiansson B. and Svensson F. (2007).

PROBLEMS WITH NON-OPEN DATA STANDARDS IN SWEDISH MUNICIPALS - When Integrating and Adopting Systems.

In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - DISI, pages 264-267

DOI: 10.5220/0002374602640267

 SciTePress

accepted world wide (Drozdik et al., 2005).

Managers of both private and public sectors have

been attracted by the OSS with the promise of a

decrease of the overall expenditures. The European

Commission has published its European

Interoperability Framework, which in particular

includes a definition of ODS as "An IT standard

(whether OSS or not) is created to enable and

facilitate the exchange of documents between

different programs, program versions, operating

systems and hardware platforms." (COSPA

Consortium, 2005, p. 9). We choose to extend the

definition of document to include Electronic Data

Interchange (EDI). With EDI we mean the transfer

of data between different companies using networks,

such as VANs or the Internet. As more and more

companies get connected to the Internet, EDI is

becoming increasingly important as an easy mechan-

ism for companies and governments to exchange,

buy, sell, and trade information (Burton, 2004).

ANSI has approved a set of EDI standards known as

the X12 standards.

The use of OSS does not imply that the data is

stored according to an open standard. However, OSS

implies access to the source-code. It is at least

possible to reverse engineer the method of storage

and therefore to better understand how to access the

organizational data, from the source-code. This

benefits and reduces the risk for future integrators or

exporters of that data if they wish to be able to

access, extract, extend or modify the data. This

possibility does not exist with proprietary solutions.

We still believe that the OSS model leads to the

creation and adoption of open standards and

increased software reuse. Proprietary software

companies tries actively to undermine OSS and the

usage of non-open data standards is one way of

doing this. When a consumer tries to change vendor

they may practically be locked-in on their current

ERP-system due to prohibitively high switching

costs that the current vendor can demand for

performing data-migration. This situation is

dangerous for Swedish municipals and can lead to a

situation in which the producer of the proprietary

ERP-system stops to compete for new consumers

and concentrates only on locked-in consumers. This

results in higher prices and reduced flexibility for

the locked-in municipal.

This paper is based on experiences from the

KOMpiere project which aims at modifying the open

source licensed ERP-system Compiere for use in

Swedish municipals. Compiere is an integrated ERP-

and CRM-system. (ComPiere, Inc., 2006). The

overall goal of the project is to support and enhance

the use of open source licensed software in the

Swedish public sector and thereby enable municipals

to lower their IT-related costs and gain strategic

control over their own IT-environment.

2 APPROACH

For this study, exploratory interviews with rep-

resentatives for four municipals in the Midwest

region of Sweden have been conducted in an

effort to generate a requirement specification of the

needed modifications to Compiere. In addition to

these interviews we also collaborated with The

Swedish Association of Local Authorities and

Regions (SALAR). The Association strives to

promote and strengthen local self-government and to

create the best possible conditions for the work of

their members (SALAR, 2006). The process we used

was iterative with several opportunities for

verification and validation of the requirements.

Based on the specification we used a specially

assigned development team that incorporated the

new requirements into a modified version of

Compiere. When problems accessing the existing

non-open data standards arose we instead aimed at

creating a prototype version to illustrate the benefits

of a modified version of Compiere, as an OSS

alternative for Swedish municipals.

3 CHARACTERISTICS OF OPEN

DATA STANDARDS

Open Data Standards will be required to ensure

interoperability for the creation of eGovernment

services in Sweden. In a pan-European perspective

this work is already initiated. The COSPA (Consor-

tium for studying, evaluating, and supporting the

introduction of Open Source software and Open

Data Standards in the Public Administration) project

studies the application advantages and drawbacks of

Open Source Software and Open Data Standards in

the public sector. The COSPA project aims at intro-

ducing, analyzing, and supporting the use of open

systems for personal productivity and document

management in European Public Administrations

(Drozdik et al.). Within the COSPA project they

have documented the following characteristics for

ODS. These characteristics must be met for the

standard to be viewed as a truly open data standard.

The standard has to be adopted and maintained by a

non-profit organization. Its ongoing development

occurs on the basis of an open decision-making

procedure accessible to all interested parties (con-

sensus or majority decision etc.). The standard has to

be published and the standard specification docu-

PROBLEMS WITH NON-OPEN DATA STANDARDS IN SWEDISH MUNICIPALS - When Integrating and Adopting

Systems

265

ment should be available either freely or at a nomi-

nal charge. Permission should be granted to every-

one to copy, distribute and use it for free of charge

or at a nominal fee. The intellectual property - i.e.

any patents that may be involved - of (parts of) the

standard should be made irrevocably available on a

royalty-free basis. There should be no constraints on

the re-use of the standard.

For governments and other organizations

adopting ODS the benefits could convey optimized

communication within and between organizations,

through interoperability, simpler integration and

faster integration. This could lead to more available

resources, greater return on investment, more op-

tions for actors and users, improved vendor indep-

endence, broader vendor choice, lower vendor cost,

higher quality, greater flexibility and possibly re-

duced risk.

We suggest the use of The eXtensible Markup

Language (XML) to define the needed ODS. XML

is not only a language for communication between

humans and the Web, it is also a language for

communication between systems. Rather than

passing parameters, and already formatted raw data,

systems can pass documents from one to another,

containing not only pure data, but control

information as well. Even proprietary old legacy

systems written in ancient languages such as

COBOL and PL/I can be adapted by means of

interface reengineering to the process and to

generate XML documents (Sneed, 2002).

By providing and using XML- based ODS, for

instance, Web Services could be used for extracting

and integrating data from existing ERP-systems. It

offers significant advantages over currently available

methods and tools. These advantages have been

widely discussed in the popular Information Techno-

logy press. Because the Web Services paradigm is

based on a new set of standards (e.g., XML, SOAP,

WSDL, UDDI) (Hansen, 2001) it promises to enable

the integration and aggregation of multiple data

sources once these open standards are supported by

the underlying ERP-systems. These standards are

being widely adopted in industry as evidenced by for

example Microsoft’s .NET initiative and Sun’s Java

APIs for XML (JAX) extensions to the Java 2

Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) (ibid). .

4 THE NEED FOR OPEN DATA

STANDARDS IN SWEDISH

MUNICIPALS

In the KOMpiere project we needed to modify and

integrate Compiere with the existing proprietary

systems. In order to do this we required access to at

least a few of the existing non-open data standards

used in the current proprietary systems. Early in the

project we discovered problems with this. We

discovered that the knowledge and awareness of the

different data structures used in the existing ERP-

systems was very poor in the municipals. This

information was oftentimes not even possible to

obtain and the different municipal’s representative’s

referred to the specific software vendor that

delivered the proprietary system in use. When trying

to access these data structures from the software

vendors. We discovered, not surprisingly, that they

were reluctant to provide us (or anyone else) with

this information. This is due to the simple fact that

data is vital to any organization. The importance of

data and data storage to any organization and their

ability to perform their services can not be stressed

enough. Where and how the data is stored defines

the organizations possibility to use, adopt and

integrate new systems and services. The ability to

extract data maybe needed from multiple requesting

sources, and the ability to move data from one

database to another, either at the end of the life of

the existing database or in the event of the sale of

that data to another organization is of crucial

importance. Of course this is a very valuable

commodity to the proprietary software vendor and

something they are reluctant to “give away” for free.

The question is how this “knowledge commodity”

ended up in their hands in the first place? The

business practices of preserving and leveraging

market advantages through non-open data standards

hinders interoperability and true market-forces to

apply. Government usage of open standards and

open source could have a positive influence on the

take-up of interoperability standards by the

competing software vendors. As municipals handle

not just confidential but also up to date information

of key importance, data loss due to unreliable

systems or unreliable software vendors as well as

data loss due to lack of knowledge and appreciation

of the value of the data-structures in themselves may

cause serious problems. This knowledge is too

valuable and important to be given away to the

software vendors.

We advocate the use of ODS for all public

government systems in Sweden. As a matter of fact

Swedish municipals should be crying out for low-

cost and flexible solutions to manage their ERP-

systems. The need for this is something that already

is identified in the European Community. In projects

such as Interoperable Delivery of European

eGovernment Services to public Administrations,

Business and Citizens (IDABC) they stress the

importance of interoperability through ODS

(IDABC, 2006). IDABC is an European

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266

Commission driven strategic project using advances

in information and communications technology to

encourage and support the delivery of integrated

cross-border public sector services to citizens and

organizations in Europe, to improve efficiency and

collaboration between European public

administrations and to contribute to making Europe

an attractive place to live, work and invest. IDABC

is a Community programme managed by the

European Commission's Enterprise and Industry

Directorate General. To achieve its objectives,

IDABC issues recommenddations, develop solutions

and provide services that enable national and

European administrations to communicate electroni-

cally and offer modern public services to

organizations and citizens in Europe (IDABC,

2006). The COSPA-project mentioned earlier is

another advocator for this. Within COSPA a study of

Dutch municipals documented by Nagler (2005, p.

1) stated that (“Open Standards are the

presupposition for collaboration with other

municipalitys in the future. Common projects can be

realised by the use of open standards.”. This is

quotation we find very relevant and expresses

something that we believe needs to be recognized

and acted upon in Swedish municipals with urgency.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The KOMpiere project started out as a project aimed

at providing the public sector in Sweden with an

open source licensed ERP-system as an alternative

to the predominant propriety systems used today.

We believe we “stumbled” on a much bigger issue,

where we discovered that at least some Swedish

municipals don’t have free access to the data they

are appointed to use, govern and protect. The

software vendors have, by using non-open data

standards, excluded the municipals from using their

own data freely. This is an alarming situation that

needs to get attention and hopefully be remedied.

We have in this paper suggested the creation and

usage of XML-based ODS for all systems used in

the public sector in Sweden. To be able to fully

provide the soon mandatory eGovernment services,

the need for this is of crucial importance.

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