Electronic government and software confederations

The state (public) information system (SIS) is the precondition of electronic government. A SIS should provide all the services of the information systems of various offices and enable access of citizens to data without any knowledge about the internal structure of the SIS. It is very difficult to achieve it. The reasons are political conditions, power interests of various groups and offices, lobbying, system size, the necessity to use existing subsystems for a quite long time, etc. The only known feasible solution is the peer-to-peer network of autonomous components (software confederation). It has not been recognized yet although there are good tools for the development of software confederations (XML, Internet). Due to bad practices the development of a SIS is usually very slow and the properties of it are far from needs. We discuss the software engineering properties of software confederations and the consequences for management of a SIS. The principles of confederations are very simple but they are very difficult to apply consistently.