The Accessibility Principle

Information and services will be made available easily, widely and equitably for the benefit of the people of New Zealand.

Equitable access to services and information promotes transparency, social equality, and self-empowerment. Users are able to make decisions regarding themselves and to leverage existing information and services to increase their social and economic capital.

Rationale

• The Accessible State Services Development Goal is to “Enhance access, responsiveness and effectiveness, and improve New Zealanders' experience of State Services”ⁱ
• The Availability Principle of the Policy Framework for Government Held Information states “Government departments should make information available easily, widely and equitably to the people of New Zealand (except where reasons preclude such availability as specified in legislation).”ⁱⁱ
• The availability of official information enables more effective participation in the making and administration of laws and policies; and promotes accountability of Ministers of the Crown and officials, and thereby enhances respect for the law and promotes the good government of New Zealand.ⁱⁱⁱ
• Better access to information leads to efficiency and effectiveness in decision-making, and affords timely response to information requests and service delivery.^iv
• It is less costly to maintain timely, accurate data in a single application, and then share it, than it is to maintain duplicative data in multiple applications. The enterprise holds a wealth of data, but it is stored in hundreds of incompatible silo databases.^v
• The speed of data collection, creation, transfer, and assimilation is dictated by the ability of the enterprise to efficiently share these islands of data across the enterprise. Shared data results in improved decisions since we will rely on fewer (ultimately one virtual) sources of more accurate and timely managed data for all of our decision-making. Electronically shared data will result in increased efficiency when existing data entities can be used, without re-keying, to create new entities.^vi

Implications

• Services must meet or exceed Ministerial and public expectations for accessibility, timeliness, responsiveness and fairness^vii
• From TOGAF
• Using information must be considered from an enterprise perspective to allow access by a wide variety of users (both human and machine).
• This is one of three closely-related principles regarding information: information is an asset; information should be shared; and information should be easily accessible. The implication is that there is an education task to ensure that all organizations within the enterprise understand the relationship between value of information, sharing of information, and accessibility to information.
• To enable information sharing we must develop and abide by a common set of policies, procedures, and standards governing information management and access for both the short and the long term.
• For the short term, to preserve our significant investment in legacy systems, we must invest in software capable of migrating legacy system information into a shared information environment.
• We will also need to develop standard data models, data elements, and other metadata that defines this shared environment and develop a repository system for storing this metadata to make it accessible.
• For the long term, as legacy systems are replaced, we must adopt and enforce common information access policies and guidelines for new application developers to ensure that information in new applications remains available to the shared environment and that information in the shared environment can continue to be used by the new applications.
• Information sharing will require a significant cultural change.
• This principle of accessibility will continually "be in tension” with the principle of trust. Under no circumstances will the accessibility principle cause confidential information to be compromised.
• Information made available for sharing will have to be relied upon by all users to execute their respective tasks. This will ensure that only the most accurate and timely information is relied upon for decision-making. Shared information will become the enterprise-wide "virtual single source" of information.
• Accessibility involves the ease with which users obtain information. The way information is accessed and displayed must be sufficiently adaptable to meet a wide range of enterprise users and their corresponding methods of access.
• Access to information does not constitute understanding of the information. People should be provided sufficient meta-information so as not to misinterpret information, such as context, semantics, business logic, etc.
• Access to information does not necessarily grant the user access rights to modify or disclose the information. This will require an education process and a change in the organizational culture, which currently supports a belief in "ownership" of information by functional units.

Footnotes

[i. Development Goals for the State Services, SSC, March 2005]

[ii. Policy framework for New Zealand Government-held information, SSC, 1997]

[iii. Official Information Act 1982]

[iv. http://www.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf8-doc/arch/chap29.html, 2007 October]

[v. Central Agencies Review, September 2006]

[vi. http://www.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf8-doc/arch/chap29.html, 2007 October 8]

[vii. http://www.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf8-doc/arch/chap29.html, 2007 October 8]