A decade ago, complying with federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations meant a huge headache for South Dakota's Bureau of Information and Telecommunications.

That's because meeting HIPAA standards requires the mainframe and minicomputer systems of social services, human services and health departments to interact.

To induce this intermingling, South Dakota would have had to put COBOL programmers to work writing programs to extract data from one system to deliver it to users in another department, said state CIO Otto Doll. "The problem with that approach," he said, "is that when you make a change to any application, you also have to go back and change all those interfaces you've written."

Dissatisfied with the state's legacy system silos, Doll has gradually moved South Dakota toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Using translation middleware called ICAN from SeeBeyond (which was bought by Sun Microsystems in 2005), South Dakota has started building composite applications using adapters that can pull data from separate sources.

For the past few years, SOA has made HIPAA compliance much easier, Doll said. For instance, human services employees enrolling people in Medicaid can now access birth and death records from the Department of Health.

Doll said South Dakota got serious about the enterprise application integration (EAI) approach in 2000. "We saw a need to extend the longevity of these systems," Doll explained. "We don't have the resources to refresh our systems every couple of years. Nevertheless, we've been able to move forward with more complex interactions and access to different applications whether they are old or new."


Options have Pluses, Minuses
South Dakota's IT leaders aren't the only ones feeling pressure to link up data from older systems. Increasingly government services are intertwined both within and across agencies. Yet CIOs find themselves inheriting a hodgepodge of servers, mainframes and minicomputers that are difficult to integrate and don't lend themselves to business intelligence-type queries.

That may explain why the worldwide application integration and middleware market grew at a 7.1 percent clip between 2004 and 2005 to total $8.5 billion, according to Gartner.

The challenge of legacy data integration is most acute in the public sector, because unlike their private-sector counterparts, government agencies typically can't afford to regularly replace systems. Faced with regulations or business needs that require integration, CIOs have several ways to respond depending on their goals, timelines, budgets and risk aversion. Options include:

• having in-house programmers write special-purpose programs to extract certain data. The limited scope may save money, but this labor-intensive approach requires programmers with the right skills. Also, programs written in COBOL and Assembler are aging, and the people who know how to work them are now retiring. Some CIOs running these applications report that no one on staff knows how to code them;
• using ETL (extract, transform and load) technology to create external data warehouses or data marts that can then be queried with business intelligence tools;
• turning to middleware vendors who develop interfaces to mediate between systems. This EAI approach, which is also referred to as enterprise information integration, can help keep data consistent across platforms. Though expensive and complex to implement, application interfaces can also be valuable for any transactional systems that require users to both read and write to the legacy system. Most middleware vendors and their customers are adopting the SOA concept and creating Web services that use XML-based open standards to enable communication between existing applications; and
• transferring applications from mainframes or minicomputers to newer systems.

Extracting Value
Legacy systems can usually do what they were designed to do; the challenge is opening them up to constituents via the Web or allowing staff members to do analysis. "Internal staff may ask questions such as, 'How many