Pushing standardised e-government services across member states, along with the ICT system interoperability to support those services, has been a big focus for the EU for some time. It wants 50 per cent of individuals and 80 per cent of businesses to use e-government tools by the end of 2015, for example.
Having the clout to deliver that transformation is a different matter: it is the responsibility of member states themselves to implement and co-ordinate e-government services. All the EU can do is set targets, promote discussion, and do its best to foster a favourable regulatory environment while introducing interoperability into its own IT infrastructure.
Ovum analyst Jessica Hawkins says that the true data-sharing at the crux of these initiatives is very hard to achieve. This is due the history of fragmentation in both national and cross-border governments: the co-ordination, let alone the interoperability, of activity across such a complex environment is creating ongoing challenges.
"Often, agencies have not had a tradition, and in some cases no legal mandate, for working together. Respecting an agency's jurisdiction is a key consideration within the public sector, so sharing data and information can be a difficult undertaking," she says.
"eGovernment and eHealth are certainly tools for improving the freedom of movement of citizens and enterprises, but they remain national areas," adds Silvia Piai, research manager for health and government insights at analyst firm IDC.
"With time, the EU has positioned itself as a great player for aggregation, best practices sharing, and setting up of indicators that have allowed single countries to measure their achievements in a constructive way."
The EU has fostered a small number of projects designed to showcase working examples of successful implementation of e-government initiatives. These are intended to make it easier for smaller businesses in the region to set up shop in other member states.
"The political will to do this is beginning to change. There are a number of European large-scale pilots, each of which represents a key pillar of delivering electronic government and provides a model for cross-border services," says Hawkins.
"These are designed to reduce administrative barriers to delivery of services to businesses and citizens across Europe where they can benefit from synergies between projects through the reuse of existing infrastructure."
Launched in 2008, the Pan European Public Procurement OnLine project (PEPPOL) was designed to ease communication between companies or suppliers and government bodies responsible for procurement processes in the EU, for example.
The thinking is that, by connecting national systems, PEPPOL will allow businesses to bid for public sector contracts anywhere in the EU. This will increase competition and transparency of government supplier contracts.
A big barrier here is the lack of common communications standards. The pilot, which finished on 30th April 2011, focused on cross-border exchange of orders, invoices and catalogues.
Standardised electronic document formats were based on the Universal Business Language (UBL) format and CEN/BII business interoperability interfaces, with Java and .NET technology in the application layer.
Progress has been slow, though key success indicators (KSIs), published for the first time in September this year, indicate "encouraging" levels of adoption by sovereign government agencies.
The first PEPPOL invoice was sent, received, approved and paid on 1st March 2011: Swedish National Financial Management Authority (ESV) received an invoice from Danish subcontractor Alfa1Lab, and imported it into its ERP system where it was approved and paid.
"By the end of the PEPPOL project, there shall be 40 (22) e-procurement communities integrated/connected to the PEPPOL community, enabling 32,000 (1,900) contracting authorities and 211,000 (132,000) economic operators to prepare/exchange business documents according to post-award PEPPOL specifications," stated spokesperson Gry Monica Hellevik in a September update.
The bracketed figures represent the number of targeted participants already signed up.
"The PEPPOL eSignature integrated solution will enable approximately 62,000 (200) contracting authorities to validate eSignature through the use of 16 (2) different eProcurement solutions," the statement continued.
"The PEPPOL pre-award solutions will enable approximately 5,000 (262) contracting authorities to apply 15 (1) different virtual company dossier (VCD) and/or eCatalogue PEPPOL solutions as part of its tender."
However, Piai comments that the process may not be easy: "We are talking about long and complex projects that do not involve just technology, but processes and cultural aspects."
Another ongoing project is the Secure idenTity Across boRders linKed [sic] (STORK) project, created to establish a European electronic ID (e-ID) interoperability platform to provide authentication of EU citizens on government websites. This will allow them access to the applications and services provided. The project involves a number of national passport offices, as well as private sector service providers responsible for delivering online services, in this case T-Systems.
STORK's remit includes testing common formats for electronic delivery of documents to ensure compatibility with different government IT infrastructures and to include unspecified transactional processes. It will also seek to develop a service to verify when a company or citizen registers a change of address between member states, as well as the authenticating access to the EU's own applications and services.
If STORK is successful, citizens should be able to start a company or get a tax refund by entering their national e-ID data online. The platform will get the authentication guarantee from the national government, removing much of the bureaucracy usually involved in such procedures and making it much easier for companies to start trading in different member states.
Elsewhere, the Simple Procedures Online for Cross border Services (SPOCS), set to complete in April 2012, is designed to give companies that want to sell services in other member states a simple way of completing the relevant administration online. This is particularly important to SMEs as it makes it easier for them to set up business abroad and get access to new markets in order to expand.
The EU is also setting targets for broadband expansion, which it hopes will encourage more economic activity. In October this year, it proposed putting €9bn of funding into Europe's digital networks as part of the Connecting Europe facility.
The money is intended to act as a 'catalyst' for additional investment from the public and private sector, by giving the project credibility and lowering their risk profiles, said EC President José Manuel Barroso.
The Digital Agenda for Europe's target of minimum broadband speeds of 30Mbit/s by 2020, with all households subscribing to speeds of 100Mbit/s or above, is designed to stimulate growth among the EU's estimated 23m smaller businesses. It will give them access to software, data storage and other cloud-hosted IT services, as well as creating millions of jobs in the telecoms and construction industries.
In Germany alone, according to EU estimates, the construction of broadband networks will create 968,000 jobs over ten years, while fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) deployments in France are set to employ 360,000 people in the same period.
Cloud computing also plays a big part in these plans, though the commission in still in the early stages of working out how to harness the technology from a regulatory and organisational perspective.
In May 2011, it opened a public consultation to collect views on the benefits of cloud computing, with the results set to be unveiled in 2012. Kroes says the EC is especially interested in cross-border data protection and liability issues, technical barriers to the development of cloud computing, and ways of introducing standardisation and interoperability.
In the meantime, the Resources and Services Virtualisation without Barriers (RESERVOIR) project was set up to create software platforms and protocols to enable SMEs to combine their datacentres into large, federated clouds. These will supply infrastructure- (IaaS), platform- (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) and the project consortium is led by IBM's Haifa Research Lab.
The project has so far led to several spin-off technologies including virtual area networks (VANs), open-source cloud software platforms like OpenNebula and Claudia. The latter has been adopted by mobile operator and consortium member Telefonica for a cloud telephony service and a cloud service monitoring tool called the Lattice framework.
Thales in France and CETIC in Belgium are also planning to offer cloud computing consulting services based on the findings of the €10.5m funded project.
"RESERVOIR helped to successfully develop a wide range of technologies, many of which are now or will soon be appearing in commercial applications," claimed the EC in a statement issued in September.
"It does seem that we will see more joined-up activity in the market," says Hawkins. "But it is necessary for a European-wide take-up of a technology to see this take place, which requires ongoing funding and investment."
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Martin Courtney
Quelle/Source: Computing, 25.11.2011
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