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Your independent resource on business integration and network computing through middleware and message brokering
Applying message and information broking
Bradley Smith
Project Manager
US Department of Transport
Management introduction
Bradley Smith is the Electronic Grants Pilot Project Manager within the US Department of Transportation (DoT), although this project's relevance is not limited only to public transportation (as will be seen). Government grants are, basically, issued to a variety of groups and enterprises. These can be for research (as in universities) or for infrastructure improvement project within a State (like extending railroads or highways). At root, however, a grant is an agreement to provide funds to a recipient that is going to do some type of work for the government in support of a broad public goal.
In this interview Mr. Smith - with Kevin Bocek of Advanced Management Technologies, Inc., who is assisting the DoT - describes how the Electronic Grants Pilot is:
- looking to the Web to reduce costs as well as accelerate delivery
- using the Internet/Web and a message broker as middleware
- exploiting one specific piece of middleware software - Active Software's ActiveWeb - to achieve these goals, and why.
Figure 4.1: Active Software's ActiveWeb
Figure 4.2: ActiveWeb and its adapters
Management conclusion
The issues of distributed systems are nowhere as complex as in government. All governments have the problem to some degree or other, especially if they wish to reduce or eliminate duplication and excessive error correction.
As Mr. Smith describes, the DoT examined what could be improved in its grant handling. On looking for solutions it found one which uses a combination of middleware and the Internet and which applies - at least from the Pilot's evidence - not only to multiple agencies but also provides a way to link to legacy systems. This is probably the burning issue in IT today - linking distributed and disparate legacy applications - and the answers are being found using one form or another of middleware which increasingly moves away from the monolithic.