Scotland's Digital Future: High Level Operating Framework Version 2

6 Federated Governance Approach

As the Framework moves into a more practical application phase, an additional level of support is required to the function provided by the Technical & Design Board. This additional support will take the form of a national federated Design Authority function.

A Design Authority function within an individual organisation (or as in the case of E-Health, within a sector), normally exists to assure the sustainability and interoperability of any new or upgraded ICT services by testing proposals against the organisation's policies, architecture and standards. This testing will usually be done within a set of pre-agreed guidelines and tolerances and any proposed new ICT service falling within those pre-agreed guidelines and tolerances can be approved directly by the Design Authority but if it falls outside these, the proposal would require to be referred to a business governance function for further consideration and approval.

This concept is extended to introduce a federated Design Authority function at a National (Scottish Public Sector) level whose membership consists of Design Authorities from across all sectors and whose primary remit is to consider proposals from individual organisations or sectors for any element of ICT Services for re-use by other sectors or for adoption as a national standard. These proposals could include standards which may have value in being mandated at a national level (Video Conferencing standard as an example), guidelines/ checklists for procurement in line with the Framework and national level ICT services. A process for proposing and approving national level components is outlined in paragraph 7.2 of this Framework.

Additionally, it has been agreed that individual Design Authorities will also take on responsibility for assuring Framework compliance for layers in the Generic Services Model as depicted in Figure 4 below

For this approach to be successful, the remit of each individual Design Authority needs to include responsibility for identifying and promoting candidate proposals for national level consideration as an integral part of their organisational/sectoral Design Authority function.

Figure 4 - Design Authority Responsibilities