Towards a Sustainable Swedish e-Government Practice : Observations from unlocking digital assets

Many public sector organisations have long-term maintenance requirements for their digital assets, and it is often the case that those assets outlive the tools that were used to generate them. In order to achieve a sustainable e-Governance practice it is therefore important to acknowledge potential risks related to lock-in and associated lack of interoperability. In this paper we report from a field-study aiming to analyse tool support for migration and long-term maintenance of documents in standardised XML-based document formats. Our investigation includes analysis of both Open Source and proprietary tools using a rich resource of public sector documents initially created in a proprietary document format. Our study reports on a range of problems associated with the use of different file formats and their implementation in tools. Specifically, we find that available tools do not satisfy the needs for migration from proprietary to open formats for editing that are long-term maintainable.