The Australian Bureau of Statistics
Company Overview
On an average working day, the Australian Bureau of
Statistics (ABS) produces four or five publications such as
the Consumer Price Index, employment levels, census data, and
so on. Their Web site has over 70,000 pages and is
widely used by the Australian community to gain access to
these statistical facts and figures.
Headquartered in Canberra with offices in all Australian
capital cities, the ABS employs around 3,500 people,
including almost 450 Information Technology (IT)
professionals. Unlike many other Australian government
agencies, the ABS owns and operates their internal IT
infrastructure and functions on a fully cost-recovered
basis. As a government body that adopted the use of
computing and IT very early, the ABS has assembled a diverse
range of applications, platforms, architectures and toolsets
over the years. This long-term use of technology has
evolved into a diverse portfolio of over 250 applications,
making it difficult to maintain the necessary skillsets
across the 200 or so people who look after these
applications.
Within the organization, there also exists a diverse range
of hardware - from Intel-based servers, desktops and
notebooks, to Sun Microsystems servers and a Fujitsu
mainframe system. Similarly, applications software ran across
a mix of Microsoft Windows® 95 and NT, Sun Solaris, Lotus
Notes, SAS and Oracle. A solution was required which would
enable ABS to continue to leverage their existing investment
in these legacy systems, yet provide a next-generation
architecture, from which future development could grow and
reduce on-going system lifecycle costs.
The second challenge facing the ABS was to find ways of
making their data more accessible to the community at
large. Says David Bennison, Chief of Applications Group
at the ABS, We already have a very sophisticated data
warehouse with a lot of information in it, but it has not
been easy to expose that to outside people. We wanted
to put a service layer around that information warehouse so
that our customers could easily get information out of
it.
Solution. The potential solution to these challenges
lay in the concept of Component Interfaces and XML Web
services. These technologies enable a modular approach to
creating software which clips together, much like building
blocks. The important question to decide was which
technology would best be used to create these building
blocks.
There are a number of competing technologies in the
marketplace for creating software based on the component
interface model, but it was critical to choose the right
one. As Bennison points out, We dont take decisions
like this lightly. We try to be involved with as few
toolsets as we can, and leverage them as hard as we can by
sticking with them for a long time. We knew the choice
of development environment would have a very large effect on
our organization for a long time, and we cant afford to make
a mistake by selecting the wrong one.
In order to accurately assess all the competing technologies
and come up with the right solution, the ABS set up an
extensive in-house testing facility using a prototype system
called DeveloperWorks. This system allowed them to test
the relative merits of the available development
environments. They wanted to get a feel for the
interoperability, ease of use and overall effectiveness of
each environment.
Bryan Fitzpatrick, Chief Technology Officer comments, When
we looked at Component Interfaces, there were several choices
we looked carefully at Websphere and J2EE, we looked at
ActiveX and CORBA and Enterprise Javabeans and we found
ourselves with a bit of a dilemma. None of those
solutions looked terribly attractive. We found
Enterprise Javabeans very complex and we werent sure how
theyd work across platforms, and it was at that point we
spoke with Microsoft and discovered XML Web services and
Microsoft® .NET. To the IT professionals within the
ABS, the concept of using the Microsoft
.NET Framework for creating XML Web services looked very
appealing the DeveloperWorks evaluation team set up some
tests with an early beta release of Microsoft Visual
Studio®
.NET and found it to be a much simpler alternative to its
Java competitor. Fitzpatrick continues, As we
looked into .NET, it was a much more attractive
proposition. Their approach seemed very sensible. It
looked like it would work well across multiple vendors and
environments, as it was based on industry standards, like
XML.
Its All About Choices.
The fundamental idea behind XML Web services is to enable an
organization to re-use pieces of code built by others,
simplifying the way applications are built and providing a
far greater degree of interoperability, flexibility and speed
of development. One of the key features of the
.NET environment is its supports for a choice of
programming languages, enabling programmers to write code in
their chosen language, and then compile the code into a Web
Service at the end. This leverages the existing skillset and
experience within the organization as no additional learning
or resources need to be sourced, making programming much
faster and simpler.
David Bennison sums it up by saying, We were particularly
impressed by
.NET because of its ease of use and its relative
simplicity.
This means we can get our relatively large group of
applications developers producing code in a consistent
manner. As a result, we can keep a lot of our costs
down by resourcing projects with people internally. From
their perspective they can easily understand the business
processes they are trying to solve as they know the
organization.
Assemble and Integrate The reusable code aspect of the
.NET solution was very important. Since Visual Studio
.NET is object-oriented, the ABS found they could use it
to easily build re-usable components, giving them agility in
meeting changing needs by assembling and integrating existing
modules to create new functionality. Says
Fitzpatrick, We wanted to build our software so that it can
be reused. So that we can in fact assemble and
integrate. And we saw that a key factor in achieving
that was to have Services Interfaces or Component Interfaces
as part of our infrastructure. We figured we could
reduce the 250 or systems we already had down to a small
number of categories. And we could say to each system,
if youre part of our business survey class, for instance,
then your system would be done this way. It ought to
use these components, it ought to be put together in this
fashion.
It is this logical structure and development methodology
that is allowing the ABS to derive significant benefits from
the modular approach of .NET.
Moving the Outside Inside
XML Web services are based on two important technologies
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and eXtensible Markup
Language (XML). SOAP is used to deliver the XML Web
service, while XML acts as the key technology underneath it.
SOAP acts as an intermediary protocol, providing a conduit
for remote procedure calls between two heterogeneous
systems. Most of the talk about SOAP in the industry is
focussed on using it externally to deliver services across
the Internet. However, the ABS saw a great deal of scope to
use it within the organization, letting it operate as a key
enabler in unifying their complex internal environment.
Essentially, SOAP, XML and the concept of Web Services are
enabling the ABS to integrate their eclectic mix of hardware
and software in a way not previously possible.
Benefits
Jonathan Palmer, ABSs Chief Information Officer, observes,
We have always believed that statistics have no value unless
they have actually been used to make a decision. The
.NET technology is helping us deliver more relevant and
timely services to people who can use our data.
Most of the ABSs statistical information is currently
disseminated as publications, spreadsheets and
webpages. Users go to the ABS site to access the
information they need. Armed with the possibilities of
XML Web services, the ABS is keen to establish the automated
delivery of their statistical services directly to businesses
and other government agencies. They plan to provide
ways to assist users in interpreting the raw data, from
including helpful metadata to providing rich data objects
such as Excel spreadsheets and pivot tables. These
processes will enable decision-making based on the data to be
simpler and much more reliable. Using XML as a data
exchange format, they see enormous possibilities for enabling
outside organizations to plug into ABS data, integrating this
data directly into their management information systems to
help make better, more informed and timely business
decisions.
A Win-Win situation for Providers
Through Web Services, other exciting scenarios are now also
possible. This includes the development of a concept called
Provider Management Services, where providers - people who
supply data by responding to ABS surveys - have a portal
style entry to the ABS site complete with access to online
forms, help and assistance, as well as a direct link to the
relevant ABS staff. This is an important
acknowledgement that the gathering and dissemination of
statistics is a two-way activity, and XML Web services are
able to present ABS customers with information which
addresses the total relationship between both parties.
The response to this idea has been very favourable so far,
with the ABSs business partners excited by the construction
of these sorts of services, enabling them to advance the way
they are able to do business together. The value proposition
for these scenarios is a win-win one, notes Palmer. Our
providers will find it easier to respond to our requests, and
the cost to us in processing the statistics should be reduced
significantly.
Making the Right Decision
As David Bennison says, We take these decisions very
carefully, over a long period of time, because we simply
cannot afford to make mistakes. Very simply,
.NET enables us to expose all of our Web Services across
all of our platforms, and were dead sure weve made the right
decision.
The overwhelming feeling within the ABS is that
.NET and XML Web services are the key to the
future. Bennison sums up that vision for the future. I
seriously believe the next five years are going to be the
most exciting times for us. Over the last 25 years, we have
been engaged in solving large business problems, and now we
feel that technology has finally caught up. With
.NET we now have the technology to be able to actually do
it, rather than just dream of doing it. I am quite
confident that the things we have been chasing all this time
will actually be within our reach within the next couple of
years.
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