August 19, 2016 at 8:53 am
I am hoping that maybe fully hosted applications can really take off - a lot of government applications while not particularly computationally challenging are complicated and obscure - add to this poor specifications and a dose of politics and even when you get good vendors in they can be totally submerged in bureaucratic inertia. Of course the one redeeming feature seems to be that data input is relatively manual and ultimately there are still patterns that should be relevant between countries (Points based visa system anyone?). I guess it comes down to motivated talented individuals finding a definable clear pattern for a universal administration task that hopefully can't be diverted by too much politics. These people exist within these organisation but may have been ring fenced within the organisation. Cheap storage and better UI tools hopefully will reduce the barrier to the right people getting their applications out there.
Who wants to take a stab at an application to help citizens submit planning applications - hosted on SQL Azure with a nice bootstrap front end sold for £500 a year to any regional authority in the world - For a text only system I would think data storage requirements might not be particularly challenging.
August 19, 2016 at 10:12 am
Dalkeith (8/19/2016)
I am hoping that maybe fully hosted applications can really take off - a lot of government applications while not particularly computationally challenging are complicated and obscure - add to this poor specifications and a dose of politics and even when you get good vendors in they can be totally submerged in bureaucratic inertia. Of course the one redeeming feature seems to be that data input is relatively manual and ultimately there are still patterns that should be relevant between countries (Points based visa system anyone?). I guess it comes down to motivated talented individuals finding a definable clear pattern for a universal administration task that hopefully can't be diverted by too much politics. These people exist within these organisation but may have been ring fenced within the organisation. Cheap storage and better UI tools hopefully will reduce the barrier to the right people getting their applications out there.Who wants to take a stab at an application to help citizens submit planning applications - hosted on SQL Azure with a nice bootstrap front end sold for £500 a year to any regional authority in the world - For a text only system I would think data storage requirements might not be particularly challenging.
I think you have a really valid idea there. I recently had a job as an "enumerator" (the guy who comes round and collects your census form) in the Irish census. It made me think about what I was actually collecting.
Census data, and a lot of the form-filling governments and similar bodies have is do, is really simple. For a given application (Census, Passport Application, Visa Application, Planning Application... etc ) the data starts out with: Name-rank-serialnumber and then you add a configurable list of questions with repeating and optional groups of questions. The issues are collecting it securely and keeping it securely, because what you collect is real gold for hackers.
Many of these applications are still ideal for Herman Hollerith's punched cards, are handling text data and don't benefit much from fancy graphic interfaces. I saw my daughter use something of the sort yesterday (for an educational institution) and someone had done a really nice job of taking the user through a lengthy, multi-part registration process. It "led you by the nose" but allowed you to save at any time and go back and review what you had entered before you finally submitted. It showed that these applications can be done well.
Tom Gillies LinkedIn Profilewww.DuhallowGreyGeek.com[/url]
August 19, 2016 at 10:49 am
I think it really hinges on the number of users. In one job we did some development of who could see the advantages in technology in making their life easier and giving them more time for what they considered the important things.
Some years later when I was working for a very small company we were sub-contracted to the main contractor. The more you went up the feeding chain the more likely people were to be late delivering and then blame someone else. I was only ever involved in two meeting with the ultimate users. There were a good percentage who were resistant to change and others who introduced usage scenarios that they could not even explain clearly. Only a few actually tried to move things forward. It was no surprise that big projects run late and over budget often failing to deliver what is wanted!
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