Acting MA CIO Appointed, ODF A Go

Andy Updegrove writes "Massachusetts has appointed ITD COO Beth Pepoli as the acting CIO of the Commonwealth. At the same time, the Governor's Communications Director, Eric Fehrnstrom, has made the clearest statement yet that it is ODF that the new CIO will be implementing: 'There have been no changes in the commonwealth's published OpenDocument rules, and we are still on track for a January 2007 implementation.' We reported on the resignation of Peter Quinn in December.

Comments

Re:Since when do states have CxOs?

[Foofoobar]

Actually, ODF is an attempt to maintain sovereignty and further separate state and corporation. By enforcinf the Open Document Format as the states choice, they guarantee that at any time in the future should older documents not work with current versions of software, that they as the state have the ability to modify existing open source code to ensure that older documents can either be converted to newer versions easily or will at least be accessible regardless of a corporations intelectual property, their development cycle, etc.

It just maintains an oprganizations ability to access their own documents without waiting for a corporation to create some sort of backwards compatible solution on THEIR timeline rather than the states timeline.

All in all a solid decision in theory. How it is implemented however can be an entirely different matter but conmsidering the intelligence and forethought that went into making this decision in the first place, it seems that implementation should be equally well thought out.