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This chapter describes an interoperability model which is applicable to all digital public services and may also be considered as an integral element of the interoperability-by-design paradigm. It includes:
- four layers of interoperability: legal, organisational, semantic and technical;
- a cross-cutting component of the four layers, ‘integrated public service governance’;
- a background layer, ‘interoperability governance’.
The model is depicted below:
3.1 Interoperability governance
Interoperability governance refers to decisions on interoperability frameworks, institutional arrangements, organisational structures, roles and responsibilities, policies, agreements and other aspects of ensuring and monitoring interoperability at national and EU levels.
The European interoperability framework, the Interoperability Action Plan (Annex 1 to the Communication) and the European interoperability architecture (EIRA) are important parts of interoperability governance at the EU level.
The INSPIRE Directive is an important domain-specific illustration [20] of an interoperability framework including legal interoperability, coordination structures and technical interoperability arrangements.
European public services operate in a complex and changing environment.
Political support is necessary for cross-sectoral and/or cross-border interoperability efforts to facilitate cooperation between public administrations.[21] For effective cooperation, all stakeholders must share a vision, agree on objectives and timeframes and align priorities. Interoperability between public administrations at different administrative levels will only be successful if governments give sufficient priority and assign resources to their respective interoperability efforts.[22]
The lack of the necessary in-house skill sets is another barrier to implementing interoperability policies. Member States should include interoperability skills in their interoperability strategies, acknowledging that interoperability is a multi-dimensional issue that needs awareness and skills in legal, organisational, semantic and technical.
The implementation and delivery of a given European public service often relies on components that are common to many European public services. The sustainability of these components, which are covered by interoperability agreements reached outside the scope of a particular European public service, should be guaranteed over time. This is fundamental, as interoperability should be guaranteed in a sustainable way and not as a one-off target or project. As common components and interoperability agreements are the results of work done by public administrations at different levels (local, regional, national, and EU), coordination and monitoring requires a holistic approach.
Interoperability governance is the key to a holistic approach on interoperability, as it brings together all the instruments needed to apply it.
Recommendation 20: Ensure holistic governance of interoperability activities across administrative levels and sectors.
Coordination, communication and monitoring are of the utmost importance for successful governance. The European Commission, through the ISA2 programme, supports a National Interoperability Framework Observatory (NIFO). Its main objective is to provide information about NIFs and related interoperability and digital strategies/policies, to help public administrations share and reuse experiences and to support the ‘transposition’ of the EIF nationally. A NIF can be one or more documents that define frameworks, policies, strategies, guidelines and action plans on interoperability in a Member State.
3.1.1 Identifying and selecting standards and specifications
Standards and specifications are fundamental to interoperability. There are six steps to managing them appropriately:
- identifying candidate standards and specifications based upon specific needs and requirements;
- assessing candidate standards and specifications using standardised, transparent, fair and non-discriminatory methods;[23]
- implementing the standards and specifications according to plans and practical guidelines;
- monitoring compliance[24] with the standards and specifications;
- managing change with appropriate procedures;
- documenting standards and specifications, in open catalogues, using a standardised description.[25]
Recommendation 21: Put in place processes to select relevant standards and specifications, evaluate them, monitor their implementation, check compliance and test their interoperability.
Recommendation 22: Use a structured, transparent, objective and common approach to assessing and selecting standards and specifications. Take into account relevant EU recommendations and seek to make the approach consistent across borders.
Recommendation 23: Consult relevant catalogues of standards, specifications and guidelines at national and EU level, in accordance with your NIF and relevant DIFs, when procuring and developing ICT solutions.
Standards and specifications can be mapped to the EIRA and catalogued in the European interoperability cartography (EIC).
In some cases, public administrations may find that no suitable standards/ specifications are available for a specific need in a specific domain. Active participation in the standardisation process mitigates concerns about delays, improves the alignment of standards and specifications with public sector needs and can help governments keep pace with technological innovation.
Recommendation 24: Actively participate in standardisation work relevant to your needs to ensure your requirements are met.
3.2 Integrated public service governance
European public service provision often requires different public administrations to work together to meet end users’ needs and provide public services in an integrated way. When multiple organisations are involved there is a need for coordination and governance by the authorities with a mandate for planning, implementing and operating European public services. Services should be governed to ensure: integration, seamless execution, reuse of services and data, and development of new services and ‘building blocks’.[26] More is said about the aspects of ‘integrated public service provision’ in section 4.3.1.
Focusing here on the governance part, this should cover all layers: legal, organisational, semantic and technical. Ensuring interoperability when preparing legal instruments, organisation business processes, information exchange, services and components that support European public services is a continuous task, as interoperability is regularly disrupted by changes to the environment, i.e. in legislation, the needs of businesses or citizens, the organisational structure of public administrations, the business processes, and by the emergence of new technologies. It requires, among other things, organisational structures and roles and responsibilities for the delivery and operation of public services, service level agreements, establishment and management of interoperability agreements, change management procedures, and plans for business continuity and data quality.
Integrated public service governance should include as a minimum:
- the definition of organisational structures, roles & responsibilities and the decision-making process for the stakeholders involved;
- the imposition of requirements for:
- aspects of interoperability including quality, scalability and availability of reusable building blocks including information sources (base registries, open data portals, etc.) and other interconnected services;
- external information/services, translated into clear service level agreements (including on interoperability);
- a change management plan, to define the procedures and processes needed to deal with and control changes;
- a business continuity/disaster recovery plan to ensure that digital public services and their building blocks continue to work in a range of situations, e.g. cyberattacks or the failure of building blocks.plan,
Recommendation 25: Ensure interoperability and coordination over time when operating and delivering integrated public services by putting in place the necessary governance structure.
3.2.1 Interoperability agreements
Organisations involved in European public service provision should make formal arrangements for cooperation through interoperability agreements. Setting up and managing these agreements is part of public service governance.
Agreements should be detailed enough to achieve their aim, i.e. to provide European public services, while leaving each organisation the maximum feasible internal and national autonomy.
At semantic and technical levels, but also in some cases at organisational level, interoperability agreements usually include standards and specifications. At legal level, interoperability agreements are made specific and binding via legislation at EU and/or national level or via bilateral and multilateral agreements.
Other types of agreements can complement interoperability agreements, addressing operational matters. For example, memoranda of understanding (MoUs), service level agreements (SLAs), support/escalation procedures and contact details, referring, if necessary, to underlying agreements at semantic and technical levels.
Since delivering a European public service is the result of collective work with parties that produce or consume parts of the service, it is critical to include appropriate change management processes in the interoperability agreements to ensure the accuracy, reliability, continuity and evolution of the service delivered to other public administrations, businesses and citizens.
Recommendation 26: Establish interoperability agreements in all layers, complemented by operational agreements and change management procedures.
3.3 Legal interoperability
Each public administration contributing to the provision of a European public service works within its own national legal framework. Legal interoperability is about ensuring that organisations operating under different legal frameworks, policies and strategies are able to work together. This might require that legislation does not block the establishment of European public services within and between Member States and that there are clear agreements about how to deal with differences in legislation across borders, including the option of putting in place new legislation.
The first step towards addressing legal interoperability, is to perform ‘interoperability checks’ by screening existing legislation to identify interoperability barriers: sectoral or geographical restrictions in the use and storage of data, different and vague data licence models, over-restrictive obligations to use specific digital technologies or delivery modes to provide public services, contradictory requirements for the same or similar business processes, outdated security and data protection needs, etc.
Coherence between legislation, in view of ensuring interoperability, should be assessed before adoption and through evaluating their performance regularly once they are put into application.
Bearing in mind that European public services are clearly meant to be provided - amongst others - from digital channels, ICT must be considered as early as possible in the law-making process. In particular, proposed legislation should undergo a ‘digital check’:
- to ensure that it suits not only the physical but also the digital world (e.g. the internet);
- to identify any barriers to digital exchange; and
- to identify and assess its ICT impact on stakeholders.
This will facilitate interoperability between public services at lower levels (semantic and technical) as well, and increase the potential for reusing existing ICT solutions, so reducing cost and implementation time.
The legal value of any information exchanged between Member States should be maintained across borders, and data protection legislation in both originating and receiving countries complied with. This might require additional agreements to overcome potential differences in the implementation of the applicable legislation.
Recommendation 27: Ensure that legislation is screened by means of ‘interoperability checks’, to identify any barriers to interoperability. When drafting legislation to establish a European public service, seek to make it consistent with relevant legislation, perform a ‘digital check’ and consider data protection requirements.
3.4 Organisational interoperability
This refers to the way in which public administrations align their business processes, responsibilities and expectations to achieve commonly agreed and mutually beneficial goals. In practice, organisational interoperability means documenting and integrating or aligning business processes and relevant information exchanged. Organisational interoperability also aims to meet the requirements of the user community by making services available, easily identifiable, accessible and user-focused.
3.4.1 Business process alignment
In order for different administrative entities to be able to work together efficiently and effectively to provide European public services, they may need to align their existing business processes or define and establish new ones.
Aligning business processes implies documenting them in an agreed way and with commonly accepted modelling techniques, including the associated information exchanged, so that all public administrations contributing to the delivery of European public services can understand the overall (end-to-end) business process and their role in it.
Recommendation 28: Document your business processes using commonly accepted modelling techniques and agree on how these processes should be aligned to deliver a European public service.
3.4.2 Organisational relationships
Service orientation, upon which the conceptual model for public services is conceived, means that the relationship between service providers and service consumers must be clearly defined.
This involves finding instruments to formalise mutual assistance, joint action and interconnected business processes as part of service provision e.g. MoUs and SLAs between participating public administrations.
For cross-border actions, these should preferably be multilateral or global European agreements.
Recommendation 29: Clarify and formalise your organisational relationships for establishing and operating European public services.
3.5 Semantic interoperability
Semantic interoperability ensures that the precise format and meaning of exchanged data and information is preserved and understood throughout exchanges between parties, in other words ‘what is sent is what is understood’. In the EIF, semantic interoperability covers both semantic and syntactic aspects:
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The semantic aspect refers to the meaning of data elements and the relationship between them. It includes developing vocabularies and schemata to describe data exchanges, and ensures that data elements are understood in the same way by all communicating parties;
- The syntactic aspect refers to describing the exact format of the information to be exchanged in terms of grammar and format.
A starting point for improving semantic interoperability is to perceive data and information as a valuable public asset.
Recommendation 30: Perceive data and information as a public asset that should be appropriately generated, collected, managed, shared, protected and preserved.
An information management strategy should be drafted and coordinated at the highest possible level (corporate or enterprise) to avoid fragmentation and set priorities.
For example, agreements on reference data, in the form of taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, thesauri, code lists [27] and reusable data structures/models [28] are key prerequisites for achieving semantic interoperability. Approaches like data- driven-design, coupled with linked data technologies, are innovative ways of substantially improving semantic interoperability.
Recommendation 31: Put in place an information management strategy at the highest possible level to avoid fragmentation and duplication. Management of metadata, master data and reference data should be prioritised.
Similarly to the way technical standards have fostered technical interoperability (e.g. network connectivity) for decades now, robust, coherent and universally applicable information standards and specifications are needed to enable meaningful information exchange among European public organisations.[29]
Given the different linguistic, cultural, legal, and administrative environments in the Member States, this interoperability layer poses significant challenges. However, unless standardisation efforts mature in the semantic interoperability layer, it is difficult to ensure seamless information exchange, free movement of data, and data portability among Member States to support a digital single market in the EU.
Recommendation 32: Support the establishment of sector-specific and cross-sectoral communities that aim to create open information specifications and encourage relevant communities to share their results on national and European platforms.
3.6 Technical interoperability
This covers the applications and infrastructures linking systems and services. Aspects of technical interoperability include interface specifications, interconnection services, data integration services, data presentation and exchange, and secure communication protocols.
A major obstacle to interoperability arises from legacy systems. Historically, applications and information systems in public administrations were developed in a bottom-up fashion, trying to solve domain-specific and local problems. This resulted in fragmented ICT islands which are difficult to interoperate.
Due to the size of public administration and the fragmentation of ICT solutions, the plethora of legacy systems creates an additional interoperability barrier in the technical layer.
Technical interoperability should be ensured, whenever possible, via the use of formal technical specifications.
Recommendation 33: Use open specifications, where available, to ensure technical interoperability when establishing European public services.
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