Danny Greefhorst has shown leadership in developing the architecture. He has been able to guide a group of people towards valuable content, all in good mutual harmony. In a complex environment, he managed to achieve a valuable result within a short period of time. Danny can write things down in an accessible way, knows how to clearly explain issues, and highlight the essential decision points. In addition, he is a pleasant person to work with. When there is friction or tension, his positive attitude and humor help everyone move forward together.

Description of the situation

The Generic Digital Infrastructure (GDI) supports the digital government with agreements, standards, and facilities. The further development of the GDI is part of the MIDO governance structure, within which the Architecture Office provides support in the field of architecture. Data exchange is one of the four domains within the GDI and concerns the exchange of data between the information systems of government organizations and with other organizations. For this domain, a specific domain architecture has been developed. In it, the objectives of the Dutch government, developments, and bottlenecks have been translated into a vision, principles, and guidelines in the field of data exchange.

Contribution of ArchiXL

Danny Greefhorst, principal consultant at ArchiXL, played a leading role in drafting the domain architecture for data exchange and the resulting activities. He developed the architecture together with architects from several government organizations. The architecture was coordinated with representatives of government organizations in an extensive review round and formally adopted by the GDI Programming Council. Explicit attention was then paid to communication, support, and advice. Presentations were given in various places, a step-by-step plan was drawn up to support government organizations in implementation, and this was also applied to provide advice for a specific government organization. The architecture has now also been published on NORAonline.

Impact of the result

There have been many positive responses to the document and the subsequent implementation activities, from the Digital Government Architecture Council, the Data Exchange Programming Table, the Federated Data System Program, and individual government organizations. There are indications that individual government organizations are actively applying the architecture and translating it to their own context. The architecture is also referenced in various places, for example in the new Logbook Data Processing standard. In addition, publication on NORAonline ensures that the results are widely accessible throughout the Netherlands.