Devil's Advocate: In support of open standards

The time is ripe for the government to use its considerable IT muscle to back open standards. Doing so will lead to better products for us all, says Martin Brampton.

As I wrote last week, Ian Watmore sees government as if it were a conglomerate in the commercial sector, with himself as CIO. There look to be serious drawbacks to this view. Moreover, the potential advantages appear to be largely ignored.

The Inland Revenue has moved a long way to provide modern IT support to people who deal with it, which means almost everybody. Last week, I received the CD produced by the revenue for employers operating PAYE, which, again, means every organisation that employs anybody.

I popped the disk into my Linux desktop machine. Well, goodness me! It is not designed to work with Linux, but only Windows and Mac. So I rebooted into Windows and explored the CD. It is a bit confusing but works quite well and is based on Macromedia Shockwave technology. The worst part of it is the range of annoying noises that accompany every mouse movement. It was a relief to hear the last 'ping' and 'boing' as I left the system.

Every user is entitled to make their decision about what system to use and it may well be that users of Windows are in the majority. But we know that even very large commercial users of IT grumble the market does not deliver what they want. A significant reason for this is the fact that in key sectors there are too few players for there to be much of a market.

A major part of the problem with getting the market to deliver is the unwillingness of the buyers to back standards with significant resources. Standards could work to create a more competitive market that was aimed at the goals set by the buyers. Unfortunately, standards are commonly driven by vendor considerations.

Yet if government is to behave as a single conglomerate rather than a whole number of separate units, then it is clearly the biggest buyer of all. As such, it has both a responsibility and an opportunity to promote standards that encourage an open market for products and services.

Once upon a time, government tried to do exactly that, with promotion of a set of so-called open standards, largely based on Unix. It foundered for two reasons. One was that a single vendor - Hewlett-Packard - seemed to be the only one to be able to consistently achieve the standards. The other was that government became too directly involved in the standards.

The opportunity to do better is now available. Despite some wrecking efforts by vendors, a good number of cross-platform standards have become firmly entrenched, driven primarily by internet developments. At least as important, the successful examples teach us a great deal about how to be successful in the creation and evolution of standards.

Neither the buyers nor the vendors have the capacity to independently produce sound standards that achieve widespread adoption while retaining independence from pressure groups. The great achievements in standards have come from standards bodies that are well resourced and supported by both sides. The process has to be flexible and pragmatic. And standards that do not adapt to meet perceived needs are thrown aside.

This is why the OSI communications standards are long gone while TCP/IP has become dominant. Because of this standard, one is able to build highly sophisticated websites that work with a variety of browsers running on different systems. The standards bodies involved have been nimble enough to meet emerging needs promptly while keeping the goal of an open market clearly in mind.

Government impinges on everybody and if it is to have any kind of centralised policy making, it needs to be alive to the possibilities. If it corrals us into the hands of a tiny group of vendors, there is little chance of us getting the innovation and competition that characterises a healthy market. The foundations are there already for a wide range of open standards. It is up to government to promote them and their extension.