On the Safety Implications of E-Governance: Assessing the Hazards of Enterprise Information Architectures in Safety-Critical Applications

Governments across Europe and North America have recently reviewed the ways in which they provide both the public and their own departments with access to electronic data. Information service architectures have been proposed as one important component of the new e-Governance visions. These web-based technologies offer huge benefits by defining common interfaces between different information systems, enabling government services to share information with the members of the public and among each other. However, the introduction of e-Governance architectures also creates a number of concerns. Inaccuracies or errors can be propagated well beyond the organizations that are responsible for maintaining the resource. There is also a concern that data, which was originally gathered for general applications, will be integrated into safety-critical systems without the corresponding levels of assurance or data integrity. This paper advocates the creation of a code of practice for the digital dissemination of safety-related information across government departments.