Sharing is caring–the whole of Victorian government API Platform

Having been involved literally from day 0, it was a humbling and gratifying experience to witness the public announcement of the Whole of Victorian Government API Portal (WoVG) launch last week in Australia.

Victorian Government API Portal

The shared WoVG API platform powered by Axway’s AMPLIFY API Management provides the foundation to expose new and existing APIs to broader Victorian government agencies’ ecosystems with abstraction and a decoupled API-first design approach supporting reuse and economies of scale.

The genesis of this digital transformation initiative goes back to the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Family Violence which highlighted critical shortcomings in information sharing and use of data across Victorian Government. Read why you need digital transformation for the future.

It is a manifestation of how technology touches and impacts human lives–and the timely, real-time, actionable information sharing between government agencies–such as Department of Health and Human Services, Victoria Police and Community Services Organisations–helps save lives!

Another key aspect of the transformation initiative was the realization to put citizens at the front and center of government services–and provide a unified, seamless experience for citizens.

Delivering on the Federal government’s push on Open Data and realizing the Digital Transformation Office push for governments to expose APIs formed key pillars of the strategic IT vision of Victorian Government to demonstrate thought leadership and being an enabler for broader Australian API initiative.

Some of the key benefits being realized through the rollout of the shared API Platform are:

• Consistency with transparency–The unified platform enables intra-government integrations while ensuring appropriate governance and security around the data flows.
• Agile delivery–Rapid and incremental value by enabling agencies choice of integration mechanisms (from defined patterns), delivering (incrementally) without impacting others and simplifying the onboarding through consistent APIs.
• Security–Ensure secure exposure of selected agency data and services through a single portal and API as a one-stop access point for various government agencies to interact with citizens.
• Cost saving–Reduction in the number of integration points between agencies, reducing deployment time and support costs through reusable APIs for data exchanges.
• Innovation–Engage the developer community to co-create and build new products and offerings on top of the services exposed by the platform.
• Visibility–The unified platform helps stem the proliferation of point-to-point solutions, and provide more visibility and control of “what, how and which” data flowing through the platform.

More importantly…

Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, it helps provide the infrastructure and avenue to get the right data, to the right person at the right time–effectively reducing the risk to human lives and making the world a better, more secure place to live!