I work in the public sector of Denmark, we’ve spent the past 15 years trying to get some cross-sectoral standards up and running. We’re getting there on data se

I work in the public sector of Denmark, we’ve spent the past 15 years trying to get some cross-sectoral standards up and running. We’re getting there on data services as well as authentication and indexes of data, and that means we’re starting to build systems that work together everywhere. Very few actual technologies have been dictated in this process. We have architectural standards for how data should be handled and how information flows are supposed to function, but no one dictates what technologies you use to build or deploy your system. We do have some, like I said, like a national standard for how we authenticate users and handle their rights using something called OIOtokens. They work with standard federated services though, so you can use key-cloak if you’re into Linux or ADFS if you’re into Windows (95% of the public sector) or something else that does federated SAML authentication. Our dataservices similarly aren’t dictated to use X, simply instructed in how information is supposed to transfer. So you can use SOAP, REST, GraphQL or whatever floats your boat, as long as the information fits the national architecture standards. You couldn’t do any of this without centralisation. On a lower level, most suppliers adopt the national standards into their own, and then add to them within their own companies or organisations, but that works perfectly fine, because everyone knows the patterns for sharing data and information.