Data Sovereignty and Open Architecture in Government Platforms: Design Principles

Imagine an institution that adopted a platform years ago. It was fast to deploy, it solved the problem, and everyone was happy. Then one day a new law requires the institution to move its records to another system, or the vendor changes its pricing, or the product is simply discontinued. Someone asks the question nobody asked at signing time: how do we get our data out?

In the private sector, a bad answer to that question is a costly migration. For a State, it's something heavier, because today's technical decisions shape the sovereignty and room to maneuver of institutions for decades.

I worked on the architecture of cross-cutting systems of the Dominican State. This article doesn't describe specific systems. It describes the principles I find most useful when designing this kind of platform, along with their real costs.

Defining Sovereignty and Overview

We'll start by defining what "sovereignty" should mean in technical terms, then walk through five principles, then look at what all this costs.