Steve Ballmer, president and CEO of Microsoft, said Tuesday that the federal government's ability to offer electronic services to citizens will rely heavily on three letters: XML.
Ballmer, Tuesday's keynote speaker for the FOSE federal information technology conference, said Microsoft is working to help agencies remake themselves in a world of changing technology. The federal government is Microsoft's largest customer in the world.
The next step for government is to think about "how to take every application, every piece of paper and push it out so that constituents can do these things electronically," Ballmer said. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the formatting code most Web sites use, is being replaced by XML, eXtensible Markup Language, he said. XML is a formatting code that makes it easier for information to be shared among various applications and between agencies.
Standardized XML would greatly improve the federal government's ability to transfer data between various computer systems, Ballmer said. "It will be the key of getting e-government to the next level," he said.
For example, XML could allow a person to apply for several grants across the federal government with a single online application.
XML also has the potential to revolutionize internal data processing systems, Ballmer said.
At the Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, Microsoft is designing an XML-based system that ships all patients' medical data from various medical centers to a single, secure repository. The project, called Health eVet, will allow doctors to view patients' histories, allow patients to input new information, and allow VA health centers across the country to share patient information.
Ballmer did not address the Justice Department's anti-trust lawsuit again Microsoft, but joked that he wished Washington, D.C. dwellers didn't get to read about Microsoft quite as much as they probably have in recent weeks.
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