Last update: 01/2005
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What is an infrastructure for cross-border eGovernment services?
Objectives
How does it work?
Achievements
Who benefits?
The role of IDABC
Technical information
Documentation
What is an infrastructure for cross-border eGovernment services?
As IDA becomes IDABC in 2005, the delivery of European eGovernment services to administrations, citizens and businesses moves to the centre of its activities. Apart from the identification of these services, this requires the definition of the infrastructure that will enable their delivery and accessibility.
Such an infrastructure will need to handle all the complexities of communication between different national and European administrations. It will have to ensure basic transmission of information, the translation of information content and meaning, and finally, it will have to link up internal administrative processes across organisations. In the terminology of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), it will have to ensure technical, semantic and organisational interoperability.
To determine the required capabilities and the implementation choices, a project was launched with the purpose of establishing a high-level architecture description for the infrastructure for cross-border services to be implemented by IDABC. This resulted in three documents: a requirements analysis, an architectural description and an assessment of market and technology trends that could impact the implementation of the infrastructure.
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Objectives
The main objective of this action is to define the architecture for the delivery of cross-border eGovernment services and the concrete implementation steps required.
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How does it work?
In order to define a vision of how to address the complex problems that must be solved on the way to the delivery of European eGovernment services, the Commission has organised a series of working group meetings to bring together national and EU policy-makers. In addition, IDA launched a study in June 2004 to determine the target infrastructure required and to provide a coherent framework for developing infrastructure components and managing their interactions. This type of overarching framework is commonly referred to as "enterprise architecture", and comprises formal descriptions of services, information, system components and technologies. It defines the services required that constitute the infrastructure for IDABC that would enable the full range of solutions.
Even if the list of European services to be developed under the IDABC programme has yet to be finalised, it is clear that it will include many different types of services with different characteristics. They may be one-way services or fully transactional, they may involve multiple communicating parties or be delivered by one single organisation, and they may be based on processes of different degrees of complexity. In order to cope with this diversity, the IDABC infrastructure will have to be flexible and scalable in order to cope with growth in service types, processes involved, as well as the number of users and the volume of transactions.
The study therefore proposes an architecture that incorporates a number of solutions to enable the delivery of very diverse European eGovernment services. These solutions range from the development of Community guidelines, which would be implemented by the Member States’ administrations, to the establishment of an EU-level “gateway” with all built-in functionalities, and with no change required at national level beyond connecting to the system. Between these two extremes, the proposed architecture provides for a number of intermediate solutions and allows mixing and matching infrastructure elements according to different needs for different services, different political contexts, different security requirements, different speeds of implementation, and different maturity of technology available in different Member States to implement these solutions.
The spectrum of solutions reflects the wide variety of required interoperations between EU-level and Member States’ administrations. They can be described along the lines of the European Interoperability Framework, which distinguishes between organisational, semantic, and technical interoperability. Similarly the proposed architecture foresees an infrastructure comprising an organisational (or ‘procedural’) layer, a semantic layer, and a technical layer. Each of these would be addressed through a “gateway” infrastructure.
In addition, the proposed infrastructure would also comprise a set of security services (identification, authentication, accreditation, etc.), as well as governance services (monitoring, measurement, etc.). Administrations participating in the delivery of pan-European eGovernment services would be able to choose the right cluster of services according to their own specific situation and that or their partners, and to the requirements for relevant services.
The study describes these principles in terms of logical and physical architecture. However, since IDABC’s portfolio of projects has not yet been known, further research will be necessary to refine this architectural overview.
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Achievements
The study on 'Target eGovernment Infrastructure for delivering European eGovernment services was launched in June 2004 and presented to the Commission in December 2004. It resulted in three reports that can be downloaded from the Available Documentation page.
Implementation of the infrastructure for cross-border service delivery will occur through the IDABC Work Programme. This will determine a set of horizontal measures as well as their budgetary requirements and implementation schedules.
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Who benefits?
Administrations: By listing the implementation alternatives, the project informs policy makers’ choices when addressing interoperability requirements. More specifically, it highlights the advantages and constraints of interoperability requirements being addressed at the level of the EU rather than within each public sector organisation.
Industry: Defining a target architecture for cross-border eGovernment service delivery allows ICT industries to help develop the standards and the solutions that will help build or link into this infrastructure.
Citizens and Businesses: The study is a further step on the road to the delivery of European eGovernment services. As such, this will lead to tangible benefits for citizens and businesses across Europe.
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The role of IDABC
The study has been financed and executed under the IDA II Programme.
The next steps will now consist in further defining the components of the infrastructure required to deliver European eGovernment services and to translate the architecture described in the study into a set of concrete horizontal measures (HMs) to be implemented under the new IDABC Programme.
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Technical information
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Project start date
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2004
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Project status
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Completed
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IDA budget
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2004 € 89,900
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Responsible service
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DG Enterprise - IDABC Unit
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Project coordinator
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Bernhard Schnittger
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Contact
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idabc@ec.europa.eu
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Countries involved
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All EU Member States, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey
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Documentation on infrastructure for cross-border eGovernment services
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Other Horizontal Actions and Measures
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