Providing Pan-European Public Services through an Interoperability Architecture

The enlargement of the European Union will lead to a higher number of cross-national curriculum vitas of European citizens. Thus, the complexity of public administration interaction across Europe will rise. To ensure that this interaction does not become a barrier to European citizens’ mobility, public administrations need to support E-Government in an informational, communicational and transactional stage, but above all in an integration stage. The interaction of processes from public services needs to be integrated in an interoperable infrastructure. Such a solution was developed in the EU project “InfoCitizen” on a conceptual and technical level. The solution was proven to be working in scenario simulating a real curriculum vitae of a mobile European citizen. 1 E-Government: The third stage The modernization of government services is one of the major objectives of the European Union. The eEurope 2005 Action Plan therefore proposes a set of actions, especially the creation and the establishment of interactive and interoperable public services [1]. Using E-Government offers new possibilities to public administrations (PA) of governments, regions and municipalities to bring public services to citizens and businesses in a more comfortable manner. For instance information technologies allow the electronic interconnection of public administrations [3]. However, the multitude of individual initiatives has led to massive solutions not compatible with each other. In the long term harmonisation will enable easy interconnection and interaction between European public administrations (EPAs). Entire programs of public initiatives are dedicated to the effort of harmonisation. While these programs contribute to an electronic harmonisation an intermediate midterm solution for interoperability between public administrations is required to make the interconnection between EPAs possible. The project “InfoCitizen”, funded by the European Commission under the 5th Research Framework Program, developed an architecture for interoperability between EPAs. The specification and execution of interoperability was not limited to system integration, but covered the whole lifecycle of interactions of organisations, public services, business processes and of course application systems. InfoCitizen started in September 2001 for the duration of 24 months with the participation of eleven organisations coming from five different EU-countries. 2 Integrated public services E-Government is considered as support of public service processes through Information Technology (IT) [2]. There are many possibilities to enhance public services by improved information exchange. Through Internet or Intranets, multiple forms of decision making, business processing or simple communication will change the interaction with public administrations [4]. Nevertheless, the degree of support for E-Government in public administrations strongly depends on its realization, mainly measured by the four stages Information, Communication, Transaction and Integration. However even today, the number of governments providing transactional features is very low and thus they underperform in the most valuable stage of Integration: Figure 1 No. of countries providing interactive and transactional features [5] The gap is even more significant when looking at the cross-country dimension. Transnational public services in Europe, i.e. those that cross the borders of the member states, are poorly, if at all, developed [6]. Therefore, pan-European interoperability between EPAs has to be fostered. Thus, there is the need for integration of citizens and businesses into public administration processes as well as the integration of different public services. The citizens and businesses can influence the execution of public services without having to know the way public services work and are processed. Consequently, full electronic support is required, covering all public services and the according processes. The InfoCitizen Project aimed at improving the process interoperability – both at the organisational and system levels – for facilitating structured information exchange and sharing amongst European Public Administrations. It achieved this by 1. designing and establishing a common, open and extensible European information architecture, the InfoCitizen European Architecture, that specifies organization-, processand system interoperability, applicable for all EPAs and that has been tested in representative public administration segments among the participating EU countries, 2. developing a distributed, decentralized, internet-based framework of standard-software components, the InfoCitizen Framework solution, building on emerging technologies (e. g. software agents, middleware, xml, Web Services) and acting as a pan-European IT interoperability infrastructure for EPAs, that support the InfoCitizen European Architecture created. 3. deploying it in a demonstration network of administrative sites, while also a pan-European integration exercise has been set up.