In the first years of CLM’s development, the infrastructure to support automated data transfer simply did not exist. This changed with the introduction of the Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF) in the UK. SIF is an enterprise messaging infrastructure and common data-model that enables the secure and reliable transfer of data between educational systems from different vendors. SIF infrastructure is now in place in many Local Authorities in the UK, including Birmingham, Warwickshire, the South West Grid for Learning, Norfolk and the London Grid for Learning.
The SIF project at Perspective is engaging and tremendously rewarding. It is a multi-dimensional project involving a wide range of skills and activities: programming, business analysis, systems architecture, deployment, customer support and, most important of all, collaboration with key-partners in the software industry and SIF community. SIF is about collaborating in the creation of a common standard that creates new, vibrant markets in interoperable products that are to the benefit of consumers and vendors alike.
While SIF has a fundamental role in providing the infrastructure for communications between systems, SIF has been only part of the development effort to improve the interoperability of CLM. Hand-in-hand with the creation of the SIF agent for CLM has been the development of business workflows and processes to ensure the safe and controlled updating of the registers of one establishment with the attendance of another establishment. Flexible mappings have been developed to map CLM lessons to home-school sessions, and rule sets have been developed that provide tight control over the updating of one attendance code with another.
To be involved in the early stages of any new technology is exciting, and participating in the UK rollout of SIF has not only given me the opportunity to create something new that has a positive effect on the working lives of others, but also to be part of something topical and relevant. The goals of SIF are reflected at the higher political level. The government’s recently published IT strategy, http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/resource-library/uk-government-ict-strategy-resources, has stressed the importance of interoperability and open standards, and the SIF Association and the government’s Information Standards Board have committed to work together to this end, http://www.escs-isb.org.uk/news/news/ISB+SIF+Association+Interoperability+Statement.htm
