Cabinet to decide on e-Gif

By RICHARD WOOD

The Cabinet will decide this morning whether to make the E-government Interoperability Framework (e-Gif) optional or mandatory for inter-departmental and shared services operations.

E-Gif, which has been going through consultations since February, is a set of policies and technical standards for government organisations to use when communicating electronically - initially with each other. About 30 areas are covered, including which security and networking protocols to use and formats for file transfer and compression.

The State Services Commission E-government unit is asking the Cabinet to make the framework compulsory for interoperability projects among the prime 40 public service departments.

Greg Sloane, project manager for the e-GIF, said it was a case of encouraging the rest of the 300 government agencies.

"The likes of the Crown agencies, the Crown entities, the Crown-owned companies and SOEs - we can't tell them what to do, we can only ask them," he said.

The e-GIF will apply only to new systems and alterations. Eventually the e-GIF will be applied to dealing with the public.

"At the moment, we haven't addressed the communication to the public. That will happen in the next review of the e-GIF scheduled for delivery in October this year," said Sloane.

"First and foremost we wanted agencies using the e-GIF, and we will grow it over time, so the first focus for us was to keep it simple. Keep it at a point where agencies understand it for interaction between themselves, and then we grow the interaction with the public once agencies are up and running."

The version of the e-GIF approved by the Cabinet will be labelled Version 1. The earlier version, 0.9, is available here.