Government Computer News
Mass. reference model stirs controversy over open formats
Since its release last September, a technical reference model issued by Massachusetts has sparked considerable debate within the government technology community—and beyond.
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At stake is the issue of how active a role public offices should take in fostering open standards. Should an agency adopt a new open format—one that would better suit its goals but may prove more difficult to deploy and manage? Or should agencies follow the best practices of the commercial IT industry, taking full advantage of cost efficiencies and new features that may follow?
The issue is especially pertinent when it comes to government records, which must be preserved for the ages.
“Documents are the lifeblood of the government,” said Dan Bricklin, IT consultant and Massachusetts resident who has been following the state’s actions. He has posted the audio files of the public meetings the state has held on the matter.
In September, the state’s CIO office issued an Enterprise Technical Reference Model that called for using open standards for data retention and exchange.
Since its release, the model has sparked considerable debate over its mandate to have state executive offices save documents in the OpenDocument format. OpenDocument is now undergoing the process of being ratified by the International Standards Organization, a global federation for validating standards.
Masschusetts CIO Peter Quinn has indicated that the reason behind the move to OpenDocument is that it will allow the state to better keep permanent records.
“Ease of access to electronic records created in proprietary formats is limited in time. Once the proprietary vendor abandons a particular version of an application or format, documents created and formatted in those applications and formats may become inaccessible to all readers,” according to the frequently asked questions section of the state CIO’s Web site.
For office productivity tasks, most of Massachusetts’ agencies now use a version of Microsoft Office, which does not offer the ability to save documents in this format. Microsoft Corp. has made no official announcement about supporting OpenDocument in future editions of the product. Other office products, including StarOffice from Sun Microsystems Inc. as well as the open-source OpenOffice on which StarOffice is based, do support the format.
“There are a lot of people who say the government is being harsh on Microsoft,” said Barry Murphy, an enterprise content management analyst for Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass. Murphy spoke at the Storage to Knowledge conference held in October by PostNewsweek Tech Media, which publishes GCN.
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