EN

COMMISSION OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES

Brussels, 3.7.2003

SEC(2003) 801

 

COMMISSION STAFF WORKING PAPER

Linking up Europe: the importance of interoperability for e-government services

 

 

COMMISSION STAFF WORKING PAPER

Linking up Europe: the importance of interoperability for e-government services

Interoperability: enabling seamless e-government in Europe

The objective of this Commission services working document is to emphasise the importance of interoperability in delivering e-government services in Europe. Interoperability is not simply a technical issue concerned with linking up computer networks. It goes beyond this to include the sharing of information between networks and the re-organisation of administrative processes to support the seamless delivery of e-government services.

However, e-government services do not stop at administrative or even national boundaries. For e-government services to support the single market and its associated four freedoms will require not only interoperability both within and across organisational and administrative boundaries but also across national boundaries with public administrations in other Member States. In addition, it will involve interoperability with the enterprise sector.

The working paper seeks to achieve acceptance from key policy and decision-makers on the need for interoperability in Europe, both within and between public administrations and with enterprises; to obtain the necessary commitments for this to happen at all levels (i.e. European, national, regional and local); and to ensure that any consequential adjustments of European or national policies occur.

1.           Introduction

1.1.        e-Government

E-government is not ‘old government’ plus the Internet. E-government is the use of new technologies to transform Europe’s public administrations and to improve radically the way they work with their customers, be they citizens, enterprises, or other administrations. Furthermore, e-government is now a key vehicle for the implementation and achievement of higher policy objectives. It is unlikely that European policy objectives on, for example, the single market freedoms, industrial policy, sustainable development and security across Europe, can be achieved unless interoperable e-government services are swiftly implemented.

E-government is built on two main but inter-related developments. The first is the business models adopted in the recent past by the enterprise sector. These are largely concerned with obtaining competitive advantage by activities such as continuous process improvement, a focus on core competencies and the re-organisation of their internal processes. The second is the use of a wide range of information and communications technologies (ICTs), of which the Internet is the most visible, in supporting organisational change, more productive ways of working and the improved provision of information and interactive services to customers.

Barriers to efficient service provision arising from the way government is organised are no longer acceptable. The public and their political representatives now expect public administration to be as efficient and effective in achieving its goals as is the enterprise sector. To do this entails both new ways of working, back-office transformation and better use of ICTs. Furthermore, just as the public can transact business with enterprises over the Internet (e.g. reserve airline tickets, purchase books, etc.) they now expect to be able to carry out similar transactions as seamlessly and as easily with public administration. This requires government to provide both information and services that are developed from a ‘customer-centric’ viewpoint.

This combination of the use of advanced ICTs, especially the Internet, in the support of new ways of working in public administration, together with the enhanced provision of information and interactive services, accessible over different channels, is the foundation of e-government. The challenge here is to ‘re-write the rules’ for how public administration works internally, interacts with its customers, and uses ICTs, not only to increase productivity by making business transactions easier to carry out, but also to address issues of social inclusion and the digital divide. For this to happen, not only should technology ensure the communication and sharing of information, but also administrative processes should be re-organised and should be able to co-operate.

However, the reality today is the emergence of ‘islands’ of e-government that are frequently unable to interoperate due to fragmentation resulting from uncoordinated efforts in developing the services, at all levels of public administration.

By joining-up administrative processes, everyone, whether in the public or enterprise sectors, could achieve a significant increase in efficiency and lower the cost of operations. Interoperability is essential for this ‘joining-up’ of public administration, to share and re-use administrative information and to provide services and information over multiple channels.

In essence, interoperability is a fundamental requirement, from both the economic and technical perspectives, for the development of efficient and effective e-government services at both the national and pan-European levels, including the regional and local ones.

1.2.        eEurope

The European Council’s special meeting in Lisbon[1] (March 2000) agreed a strategic goal for the Union to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion, by 2010. Key to the achievement of the Lisbon goals is the eEurope initiative, aimed at stimulating the provision of interactive services by government and increasing productivity throughout the economy, as approved at the European Council in Seville (June 2002).

The steps to achieve eEurope are set out in the eEurope 2005 Action Plan[2], which, inter alia, sets the target for the European Commission, by 2003, to issue an agreed interoperability framework to support the delivery of pan-European e-government services to citizens and enterprises. This interoperability framework, which can be defined as the set of policies, standards and guidelines describing the way in which organisations have agreed, or should agree, to do business with each other, is to provide the specifications for joining up the information systems of public administrations across the EU. It will be based on open standards and encourage the use of open source software. The Action Plan also envisages that the enterprise sector should, by the end of 2003 and with appropriate support from the Commission and the Member States, develop interoperable e-business solutions. Interoperability, therefore, for both the public and enterprise sectors, is at the heart of the eEurope 2005 Action Plan and the achievement of the Lisbon goals.

1.3.        Why a Working paper on interoperability and e-government

It goes without saying that Europe’s governments, whether at the local, regional or national/federal level, and the European institutions and agencies must work together to achieve the goals of the Lisbon Summit. But ‘government’ is a complex process and it will be a significant challenge to get all the parts and all the levels to work together, both nationally and across Europe, in the pursuit of common goals.

Interoperability is the means by which this inter-linking of systems, information and ways of working, whether within or between administrations, nationally or across Europe, or with the enterprise sector, will occur.

This working paper highlights the critical issue of interoperability in achieving the Lisbon goals and in helping Europe’s public administrations work together more effectively to achieve shared policy objectives and to work as effectively with the enterprise sector. Simply put, without interoperability, both within and between the public and enterprise sectors, electronic ways of working are bound to fail.

The paper seeks to achieve acceptance from key policy and decision-makers on the need for interoperability in Europe, both within and between public administrations and with enterprises, to obtain the necessary commitments for this to happen at all levels (i.e. European, national, regional and local) and to ensure that any consequential adjustments of European or national policies occur.

It is developed from the conclusions of the e-government conferences held under the auspices of the Swedish[3] and Belgian[4] Presidencies of the European Council, for submission as a working paper to the e-government conference[5] of 7^th – 8^th July 2003, jointly organised by the Italian Presidency and the European Commission. In parallel, opinions were also collected from administrations, enterprises and research communities in fora such as the IST workshop on e-government interoperability[6].

2.           The key role of interoperability

2.1.        Interoperability

Interoperability is like a chain that allows information and computer systems to be joined up both within organisations and then across organisational boundaries with other organisations, administrations, enterprises or citizens. It has three aspects:

–               technical interoperability, which is concerned with the technical issues of linking up computer systems, the definition of open interfaces, data formats and protocols, including telecommunications;

–               semantic interoperability, which is concerned with ensuring that the precise meaning of exchanged information is understandable by any other application not initially developed for this purpose; and

–               organisational interoperability, which is concerned with modelling business processes, aligning information architectures with organisational goals and helping business processes to co-operate.

While interoperability seems so logical and the requirement for interoperability so obvious, it is a fact that information systems today are not interoperable in the way that, for example, telephones or postal systems are. It is only with the recent development and ubiquity of ‘Internet-type’ technologies, based on universally agreed open standards and specifications, that it has been possible to achieve a high degree of technical interoperability. The Internet itself is a good example of this, where computers and information resources all over the world can link up, present data in a universally readable format and exchange e-mail by simply respecting protocols such as TCP/IP, HTTP and S/MIME.

The Internet works because of this compliance to agreed standards for linking computers and for information presentation. To move from simply presenting information to where computer programs can exchange it, combine it with other information resources and subsequently process it in a meaningful manner requires agreement on a wide variety of more complex issues that relate to the context within which information is created and used. This is the subject of semantic interoperability. It entails agreement on, for example, ways to discover, represent and give context to information. This will allow automated tools to share and process information, even when they have been designed independently. The objective is, not only to allow information resources to be linked up, as they are in today’s Internet, but also to allow information to be automatically understandable, and, consequently, reusable by computer applications that were not involved in its creation[7].

The automated processing and re-usability of information across systems and platforms also gives rise to organisational issues. Traditionally, organisations have developed hierarchical organisational structures to serve well-defined user communities, each with their unique ways of processing information. This hierarchical framework has resulted in closed, vertical, unscaleable and frequently proprietary information systems that mimic their paper-based predecessors and cannot share information across internal structures, let alone with other organisations.

However, these traditional systems are not suitable for organisations that wish to extend their business processes to include suppliers, business partners and customers (e.g. as in supply chain management). The objective here is to obtain real business benefit and more effective ways of working by co-ordinating business processes that span not only intra-organisational boundaries, but also co-operate with the business processes of partner organisations that may well have different internal organisation and operations.

This is the domain of organisational interoperability. It is the third aspect of interoperability and without it e-business solutions, designed to enable anyone, anywhere, to do business with anyone else over the Internet, with little or no need for human intervention, will be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

Interoperability, therefore, allows organisations to share and re-use information both internally and with their business partners and for their business processes to co-operate in achieving agreed objectives, thus helping organisations, in both the public and enterprise sectors, to be more effective in the achievement of their goals.

2.2.        Interoperability requirements between administrations

A key aspect of e-government is bringing public administration closer to citizens and enterprises. To do this many Member States are aggregating their e-government services around ‘life events[8]’ and ‘business episodes[9]. Simply put, this means that the service is organised around an event that makes sense to the customer, be they a citizen or an enterprise, and that the customer needs not be aware of the various public administration bodies that co-operate in seamlessly delivering the service.

It is clear that agreement on common standards and specifications is essential to support life event and information sharing e-government services. But agreement on common technical standards is not, in itself, sufficient. The joining-up of administrative processes is also required for the development of seamless and integrated e-services. It is this combination of agreed rules on standards and on processes, coupled with well-defined agreements on the roles, duties and responsibilities of all parties involved (whether at the European, national, regional or local levels) that provides the foundation for the successful realisation of e-government.

The ultimate goal is, of course, to provide transparent and seamless access to e-government services even if this requires access to services from more than one administrative body, the sharing of information possibly stored in multiple formats and the subsequent managing of this information by different administrative processes. This requires interoperability at different levels both within administrative bodies, across administrative boundaries and, where necessary, with the private sector.

E-government services frequently need to link and combine content from multiple and diverse information resources. Interoperability of databases, for example, is a key requirement for the development of new added-value services and for cross-border government information services. However, unless databases are interoperable and conventions for the description of information are agreed it will be impossible to combine content resources at the national level, let alone across Europe’s borders.

Furthermore, the interoperability of databases and the information they contain would allow public administration to implement ‘value added’ client-centric services that cannot be implemented on disaggregated information. These would typically involve the provision of client-specific services that can only be determined when client data from multiple sources is aggregated and evaluated as a whole[10].

But the sharing and exchange of information raise important data protection and privacy issues. These must be suitably addressed if e-government services based on information sharing and aggregation are to gain acceptance and usage. This in turn may well have serious implications for interoperability policy to ensure that privacy concerns can be met while providing such e-government services.

Furthermore, open interfaces and specifications are required for the ‘common components’ of e-government services. These include electronic payment systems, open and non-proprietary document formats, ways of cataloguing and classification, security and privacy issues, electronic signatures and the means of communicating with supporting back-office processes, etc.

Failure to put in place interoperable e-government systems will have both economic and social costs. These include: static unresponsive public administrations that are expensive to run and are unable to implement policy in an effective and timely manner; the inability to develop value added e-government services based on sharing information from multiple heterogeneous resources; and higher costs and a greater administrative burden for Europe’s enterprises.

Interoperability, therefore, is vital if e-government services are to be rolled-out in a shorter time, at a lower cost, with more flexibility to adapt to new requirements, to work in an ever-changing environment and be delivered in a seamless way across Europe’s borders to all of Europe’s citizens and enterprises.

2.3.        Interoperability between the public and enterprise sectors

Today in Europe enterprises work within a regulatory regime that includes frequent and mandatory dealings with government. This places a high administrative burden on enterprises. Furthermore government services, which seen from the perspective of the customer relate to a single business event, may involve multiple dealings with separate administrative bodies. This places Europe’s enterprises at a competitive disadvantage relative to those operating in more benign administrative regimes, while to complete simple transactions enterprises incur costs and may waste time by having to deal with different ministries and agencies.

Government services and requirements have a major impact in the EU economies. They include public procurement, taxation returns, financial transactions, licenses, planning permissions, import and export services, patents, etc. The extension of commercial B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to citizen) models to public administration services could be a major untapped driver of economic growth that could give a further much-needed boost to growth in productivity[11].

The provision of e-government A2B (administration to business) services in Europe will also act as a powerful stimulus for enterprises, notably for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), to adopt electronic ways of working in their dealings with public administration. Ideally, this should facilitate the integration of public administration requirements into the work processes of enterprises. This would be similar to the way many major private sector companies expect their suppliers to interact electronically with them. It would thus contribute to building a European business environment that would help SMEs ‘go digital’[12] and encourage and support entrepreneurs and competitiveness.

If standards-based, interoperable, B2B and B2C solutions with market acceptance are developed to the extent expected, their adoption for A2B and A2C (administration to citizen) services should be assessed and, where appropriate, encouraged[13]. Examples of relevant interoperability initiatives in the private sector are outlined in Annex 1.

3.           The need for interoperability at the European level

For the successful development of pan-European e-government services, policy should be developed that specifically addresses its European dimension. This is additional to what is being achieved at the national level. Ideally, such policy should specify the requirement for Europe’s public administrations to make it easy for citizens and enterprises to transact business at the European level, i.e. to carry out cross-border transactions with public administrations in Member States other than their own. Simply put, for national e-government services to support fully the single market will require that they are open, where required, to citizens and enterprises throughout Europe, and that the interoperability efforts, currently taking place nationally, be scaled up to work at the pan-European level.

The increase in mobility across borders, both for citizens and enterprises, will entail that greater attention be paid by administrations to the needs of all of Europe’s citizens and enterprises[14]. A key element for success, therefore, will be the inclusion of the pan-European dimension in national e-government strategies to ensure that all citizens, enterprises and administrations will have access, where needed, to e-services of any EU public administration in a seamless way, regardless of whether the service is under the responsibility of a local, regional or national public administration, or a European institution or agency. This will also involve new e-governance declarations that should tell Europe’s citizens and enterprises how public administrations will now deal electronically with cross-border users.

Furthermore, the development of the single market and its associated freedoms will require that national e-government systems are interoperable. Citizens that work and re-locate within and enterprises that trade across the Union will need to interact electronically with public administrations in many Member States. They should be able to do this with same ease as local citizens and enterprises. For this to occur, not only should national e-government services be open to cross-border users, but also the supporting back-office systems of Europe’s public administrations should be interoperable to facilitate any supporting information exchanges[15]. Support for such activities will be an integral part of the new programme IDABC (Interoperable Delivery of pan-European eGovernment Services to Pubic Administrations, Businesses and Citizens), currently in preparation.

To address these policy issues, strategies as well as business models and associated interoperability frameworks are required. Because interoperability is essential at both the national and pan-European levels, the Member States’ administrations, the Commission and the European institutions and agencies could well achieve synergies by collaborating in interoperability initiatives, and by improved co-ordination between Community programmes in the field of interoperability. In addition, as envisaged in the eEurope 2005 Action Plan, close co-operation with standards-based interoperability initiatives in the enterprise sector and with the European standardisation organisations should be encouraged.

Finally, interoperability can play a key role in assisting the enlargement of the Union. The accession of a candidate country to EU membership entails the adoption, enforcement and development of the EU’s acquis communitaire (i.e. all the necessary legislation as well as the policies and organisations required to apply and enforce this legislation). This frequently involves the exchange of administrative and related data not only with the European Commission but also with other Member States’ public administrations. Here, interoperability is essential to ensure the speedy and efficient integration of the accession countries’ administrative systems with those of the Commission, the European institutions and agencies, and the other Member States.

4.           The European Interoperability Framework

The interoperability framework in support of the delivery of pan-European e-government services to citizens and enterprises, which is to be agreed and issued as described in the eEurope 2005 Action Plan, is presently being developed under the IDA (Interchange of Data between Administrations) Programme, in close collaboration with Member States, Acceding and Candidate States, as well as EU Institutions and Agencies.

Based on the premise that each Member State has, or is in the process of developing, its national Government Interoperability Framework, as illustrated in Annex 2, the European Interoperability Framework focuses on supplementing, rather than replacing, national interoperability frameworks by adding the pan-European dimension. It provides guidance of general and conceptual nature and is complemented by the IDA Architecture Guidelines describing technical issues involved.

Successive versions of this Framework, appearing on a regular basis, will be needed to cover the developments in the field of organisational, semantic and technical interoperability. This process will ultimately lead to a sophisticated set of solutions for interoperability at the pan-European level and will as such be a major contribution to other current and future Community activities in support of interoperability, as illustrated in Annex 3. The first version of the Framework is planned to be available for comments on the IDA web site[16] in September 2003.

5.           Conclusions

This working paper is aimed at highlighting to key policy and decisions makers the importance of interoperability in reaching both eEurope and Lisbon goals and seeks to foster the necessary commitments for interoperability to be achieved at all levels (i.e. European, national, regional, local) as well as with the enterprise sector. In particular, it emphasises the need for interoperability, not only in and beetwen national, regional and local public administrations, but also across Europe’s borders with public administrations in other Member States and also with the enterprise sector. To conclude:

–               The provision of world class e-government services, underpinning the achievement of key European policy objectives like single market freedoms and enlargement, requires interoperability between the IT systems of Europe’s public administrations, as well as between their information holdings and administrative processes.

–               Government services and requirements have a major impact in the EU economies and e-government services, particularly if interoperable with the enterprise sector, could be a major untapped driver of economic growth that could give a further much-needed boost to growth in productivity.

–               No significant productivity gain will be achieved by implementing e-government services that simply replicate existing paper-based systems. The interoperability of ICT systems, sharing and re-use of information and joining-up administrative processes, both within and between public sector organisations, is essential for the provision of high quality, innovative, seamless and customer-centric e-government services.

–               E-business models developed in the enterprise sector should be assessed and, where appropriate, their use by public administration encouraged. In addition, as envisaged in the eEurope 2005 Action Plan, close co-operation with standards-based interoperability initiatives in the enterprise sector for the development of open platforms and with the European standardisation organisations should be encouraged.

–               The needs of trans-border users of eGovernment services, be they citizens, enterprises or other administrations, are not generally taken into account when implementing eGovernment services nationally. Greater awareness is required at the national level of the fact that potential users of the services exist not only nationally but also potentially across Europe. The administrators’ interoperability efforts should be accordingly scaled up, to enable the development of pan-European eGovernment services. A key role in this context will be played by the European Interoperability Framework currently under development, and by the new IDABC programme.

–               The use and development of new technologies and new paradigms should be explored in order to start creating mid and longer-term interoperability solutions for the future. The IST priority of Framework Programme 6 is particularly well placed to perform research and technological development (RTD) activities addressing this key topic[17];

–               It is also essential to build cooperation mechanisms between MS administrations, relevant national and European Union initiatives, standardisation initiatives and other market initiatives as well as the research activities. These mechanisms should be instrumental in exploiting synergies and reaching agreements on a voluntary basis.

ANNEX I
Interoperability activities in the enterprise sector

The development of e-commerce has resulted in several initiatives taking place in the enterprise sector to develop interoperability frameworks[18] that will allow enterprises, of any size, in any industry and in any location to participate in e-business. These frameworks provide the technical foundation for the use of modern ICTs and the Internet to carry out business electronically. Examples include ebXML[19], OASIS[20], RosettaNet[21] and the Web Services[22] set of technology standards.

There is also a range of other interoperability initiatives, aimed at standardising the exchange of business information in particular sectors and other frameworks, frequently of a proprietary nature, provided by ICT vendors.

In this context, the eEurope 2005 Action Plan clearly states (sec. 3.1.2) that it is the enterprise sector, supported by the Commission and Member States, that should develop interoperable e-business solutions for transactions, security, electronic signatures, procurement and payments to facilitate seamless, secure and easy cross-border electronic business and mobile commerce.

In response, the European standardisation organisations (CEN[23] and ETSI[24]) have developed a Rolling Standardisation Action Plan[25] in support of the eEurope initiative. The objective of this market-driven initiative is to better streamline the European ICT standardisation work towards the targets of the eEurope initiative, to accelerate the implementation of the standardisation work programmes and to ensure the involvement of all relevant stakeholders in the standardisation process. This should allow for the development of a consistent standardisation strategy in support of eEurope 2005.

ANNEX II
Interoperability activities in Europe’s public administrations

Member States’ governments are currently defining standards-based interoperability frameworks for their public sector bodies. The goal of these frameworks is to empower joined-up and web-enabled government, and to improve its flexibility and efficiency. Typically, the interoperability frameworks reference market driven and open standards and specifications. Examples include the:

–               UK government’s E-government Interoperability Framework (e-Gif)[26] that prescribes the policies and technical specifications that will act as the foundation of the UK’s e-government strategy;

–               French government’s Cadre commun d'interopérabilité[27], which is designed to support partnership between central administration and the local authorities, in particular in the field of on-line services to citizens and enterprises;

–               German government’s SAGA[28] framework that specifies the standards and architecture for the Federal Government’s e-government initiative. This has the goal of offering by 2005 over three hundred and fifty government services on-line;

–               Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation’s national white paper on enterprise architecture which recommends the adoption of a service-oriented architecture model, in which IT solutions are modularly designed services that have well-defined interfaces to each other and to legacy systems;

–               Finland's Advisory Committee on Information Management in Public Administration, JUHTA’s[29] recommendations on the common identification of objects, classifications, data exchange standards and information content and structures. The Ministry of Finance[30] has produced recommendations on information systems architecture, technical interfaces and an XML strategy;

–               Netherlands’s government catalogue ‘Open Standaarden en Open Source Software voor de overheid (OSOSS)’[31], which lists approved open standards for use in government applications.

–               Spanish government’s Criteria for security, standardization and preservation of information of applications used by the Administration for the exercise of its competences[32], that includes both legal requirements and the corresponding technical and organisational recommendations.

Equivalent activities are taking place in other Member States that are either developing similar frameworks or are adopting the above to their national needs. Also, within the European Commission, as part of the E-Commission[33] process, an interoperability action plan has been drawn up to pursue the objective of establishing seamless systems for its management processes in internal administration.