At the heart of this vision of a pan European bureaucratic paradise will be modern public administration built on digital services together with streamlined e-government processes. The result will be borderless electronic mobility smoothed by interoperability among all national and regional administrations in the EU.
Unveiling this goal of EU interoperability on Thursday, Commission Vice-President Gunter Verheugen, responsible for enterprise and industry policy, said, "the single market relies on modern and efficient public administrations which facilitate the mobility and seamless interaction of citizens and businesses. Interoperability is the basis for working together in the internal market. It will contribute to making Europe an attractive place to live, work and invest."
One of the major challenges of e-government is the multiplicity of government layers in the EU at the national, regional and local levels. Interoperability in e-government requires that all these layers are able to exchange information and to approach each other for services that are being delivered at a different administrative level.
Setting out a proposed blueprint for pan European e-government, the Commission sees a need for interoperability at three levels.
At the first level is organisational interoperability. This encompasses administrative processes covering what the Commission calls "life-time events" for citizens -- births, marriages and social security, for example. Also at this first level are "business-events". These include setting up a company, paying taxes, and procurement activities.
At the second level is semantic interoperability, meaning that the systems must "understand" each other's language. For example, birth certificates are standardised documents in terms of the information they contain, yet look very different from one country to another.
Finally, there is technical interoperability: the various EU states' computers must be able to "talk" to each other. This is the interoperability level that is normally tackled through standardisation.
The goal of the Commission's communication on Thursday is to encourage Member States and industries to set priorities, publish policy documents and guidelines, and to exchange technical recommendations with a view to encouraging pan European standardisation.
The coming months, says the Commission, will see the proposed development of concrete steps following the e-government action plan -- part of the i2010 initiative.
Autor: Cliff Hutton
Quelle: ElectricNews, 23.02.2006
