The emergency responder community currently relies on a range of processes to inform partners of incidents for which their assistance might be required. These include manual processes such as telephony, facsimile as well as some electronic methods. Some of these tie up resources as they call their counterparts and introduce risks of miscommunication as common data fields are re-keyed into multiple systems.

The public sector relies upon sharing written information electronically; through email and increasingly through the use of instant messaging and other collaboration services.  In addition the email services also allow the sharing of diary information and often integrate with video and teleconferencing services.
In order for electronic communication to deliver its true potential it needs to allow multiple systems to communicate between themselves in order to provide one or more of the various services, allowing different vendors to easily interoperate.  This will in turn allow members of government departments to communicate more easily both with colleagues in other departments and with the public.

The Transparency Agenda requires greater openness and transparency in many aspects of public administration. A key part of this is publishing financial transaction data, showing entry-by-entry how much each public body has spent with external suppliers, on what, and under what contract. For these data to be useful in holding government to account, they must be prepared and published in consistent, comparable form, for which we need appropriate open data standards.