Addressing the Influencing Factors for Interoperability in a Global Domain

Abstract

Achieving interoperability in global context is difficult. Although the benefits of enabling systems to interoperate globally are significant, repeated failures to build working systems provide evidence that the tasks necessary to gain those benefits are poorly understood. Many organizations have addressed interoperability as primarily a technical issue [2]. However, to address the entirety of the interoperability challenge, development teams must also consider nontechnical factors that influence their efforts to meet interoperability goals. This report describes a proposed model through which one can understand interoperability in global context. With this model, system developers should characterize interoperability in six dimensions: Developers need to analyze interoperability requirements at the technical, semantic, and organizational levels, but they should also consider the legal, political, and socio-cultural issues with the system must also interoperate [5]. This paper explains some of the challenges associated with achieving interoperability in systems and presents some guidance on how to address interoperability requirements, with the goal of making both policy makers and system developers aware of the depth and breadth of enabling interoperability to provide many benefits, including improved efficiency, transparency, accountability, and access, as well as coordination of services at lower costs. However, repeated failures to build working systems show that the task is not only difficult but also poorly understood. This report describes a proposed model for understanding interoperability in e-governance system context. With this model, system developers should characterize interoperability in six dimensions: technical, semantic, and organizational, as well as legal, political, and socio-cultural. This report also presents guidance on how to address interoperability requirements and describes challenges that policy makers and system developers face in achieving systems interoperability.