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In order for timely and accurate data to be available, State agencies and municipalities must make significant changes to their information infrastructure. All too often, public data sets released to the public contain inconsistent geographic divisions and categories. Well meaning officials seeking to protect confidentiality are too often overly conservative and release no data whatsoever. Information systems and department policies are structured solely to administer programs, with little regard to serving up data for evaluation or to inform public discourse. Uncoordinated technology purchases result in incompatible systems that do not communicate with each other, and inconsistent funding make creating a coherent information system challenging. Although some towns and departments are technology leaders making strategic, forward-looking investments in Information Technology (IT) infrastructure, many are behind and even further threatened by budget cuts.

New technology, standards, and protocols make a new type of IT infrastructure possible. The Commonwealth can start implementing a federated data center approach to the state one agency and municipality at a time. A service oriented architecture making web services available over the Internet can make new forms of data collection and analysis possible and realize investment efficiencies. Finally, ensuring that all the data that is harvested from these efforts remains public information is critical. Municipalities and state agencies will need continued leadership, technical assistance and incentives from the state’s Information Technology Division to shift to this new paradigm. The resulting information infrastructure will be characterized by a nimble information systems that exchanges data quickly and efficiency through web services for use in a wide range of purposes.

10)    Create the information infrastructure necessary to make data accessible in a timely manner

11)    Use licensing to allow public use of government-created data while protecting agency interests