Two New Bricks

by Nancy Armentrout and B. Victor Chakravarty, OIT

(Some of the hyperlinks below are accessible only from the Intranet)

The Strategic Architecture Committee may be familiar to readers from previous Newsletter articles (November 2007, August 2007, and May 2007). One new member has joined the committee since our last Newsletter update: a Systems Team Leader from the Office of the Secretary of State. The committee continues to meet on alternative Thursdays to pursue its mission.

The committee publishes its output for internal vetting at its Intranet home. We eagerly welcome feedback on the published material from the IT community in Maine State Government. And that means not just OIT, but IT personnel from the Legislative and Judicial branches, as well. The committee has already made several changes to its materials based on community feedback received so far. We heard from you at the Maine Digital Government Summit 2007. We also heard from you at the two dedicated focus groups held in November-December 2007, one on Web Publishing and the other on Single Sign-on. Thank you so much for your feedback. It has forced us to consider viewpoints that we overlooked on our own, and thereby, made our material that much stronger. Please keep the feedback coming.

We currently seek your input on two recently published Bricks: Reporting Tools and Desktop Operating Systems. One distinguishing feature of these two Bricks is that they exert a direct impact on the larger user community. This is very different from Web Publishing and Single Sign-on, which primarily impact just the IT community. Therefore, it is even more important that we hear back from the widest possible audience, far beyond just the IT community. Please feel free to discuss these Bricks with the users that you serve in your daily work.

Of course, we are eager to hear back from you on all aspects of our work, not just the two recently published Bricks. Please email your thoughts and comments to the Enterprise Systems Architect. Once the committee gathers all the community input, it will reconcile them and update the relevant documents.