Cabinet Office Chief Information Officer

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Architecture and Standards

Architecture and standards work underpins all elements of the ICT strategy. It enables interoperability and the sharing of data, provides opportunities for reuse of ICT components, and facilitates transition between suppliers and products.

The use of standards ensures that our ICT assets are open for others to build upon and that in future ICT infrastructure and services will be able to be provisioned from the Government Cloud.

What are standards and architectures for?

Architecture and standards enable provision of better public services for citizens and businesses by providing the mechanism to deliver joined-up, responsive services.

An enterprise architecture provides a blueprint for how strategies, capabilities, processes and infrastructure can be organised to deliver our services. It provides us with a logical approach to managing our ICT, showing us how components should fit together and where they interconnect. In order to ensure interoperability we must specify which standards to use so that our ICT systems can interconnect.

Overlaying this, an information architecture is vital to ensuring that information and data can flow across government to provide seamless, efficient, secure and trusted services. It also provides opportunities for the re-use of non-personal public data, benefiting the economy, enabling transparency and fuelling innovation.  

Key achievements

• A high-level technical blueprint called the cross-Government Enterprise Architecture (xGEA) reference model has been published. 
• Assets for reuse (known as exemplars) have been documented that fit within the model and reference architectures and principles have been developed to build a framework to support the xGEA.

Standards and architecture (ICT Strategy) [PDF]

Contact
For further information email cto@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk