Page 28 - FCW, June 2017

Here’s an overly simplistic state- expenses — was an enormous project Indeed, before the 1990s, it was hard
and one that was generally siloed. Get- ting the travel expense system to talk to payroll was a giant project on its own. Getting one large siloed system to talk to another large siloed system was a huge effort.
Rather than rely on connections after the fact, interoperability should be a key feature of any government IT system being built today
BY DAVID EAVES
ment but generally a good rule
of thumb about IT in govern- ment: Systems integrators are a symp- tom of poor systems architecture.
In other words, today’s systems inte- grators — the people being asked to cre- ate software that (usually) enables the government to extract data from one software system and then restructure it or create processes around it so that it can be shared with another software system — are being asked to do work that shouldn’t exist.
They are symptomatic of a failure to realize that any large IT system could and likely will need to be a platform. They also represent a window into a massive opportunity to reduce spending on government IT systems.
That wasn’t always the case. For many years (decades!), there was a need for systems integrators. Build- ing and designing a large IT system — for example, one that tracked travel
to even imagine persuading those large, complex systems to talk to one anoth- er. And then we began to see that get- ting them to talk to one another might be possible — and that’s when the sys- tems integrator became necessary and important.
But by the time the 2000s rolled around, we were living in the world of the web, and people could see that standardizing the structure of informa- tion meant one didn’t need to build cus- tom software to connect one system to another. Instead, the right application programming interface (API) would allow any system to grab the informa- tion it needed without requiring an integrator to build custom software connections.
If from the outset of any project you accept that your system will need to talk to other systems, you will design it so that data and information can be accessed via API. If you believe that it
DO WE STILL NEED SYSTEMS
INTEGRATORS?
22 June 2017 FCW.COM