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ISA² - Interoperability solutions for public administrations, businesses and citizens

Help us shape the future digital public administrations at regional and local level in the EU

Emanuele Baldacci

Emanuele Baldacci, Director of Digital Public Services, Directorate-General for Informatics, European Commission

We are currently shaping digital public administrations, and we would like to know your views and opinions. This is why we are proposing a workshop on ISA² Programme: Boosting Digital Public Administrations at the European Week for Regions and Cities next October 2018. 

Citizens across Europe are more and more on the move, and businesses are increasing their cross border activities. Data needs to flow smoothly as well, and services need to be provided seamlessly, across borders. Uncertainty may come, however, when people are abroad and wonder whether things work the same way as in their home country. Some of the situations below may stress them a lot:

  • Moving to a different city and waiting for hours in the town hall to register in the new neighbourhood, just to learn there is a document missing in your application? 
  • Preparing a tender and struggling with the hundreds of documents you have to submit?  
This is what digital public administrations are all about: provide consistent and coherent services all across the EU, to make you always feel like at home. 

Digitising public administrations is not a simple task, though. We need to bring together all the EU Member States and provide them with coherent and consistent tools to modernise trustworthy and transparent end-to-end public services, applying eGovernment principles such as once-only and digital-by-default. One of the first steps was the launch of the new European Interoperability Framework (EIF). This framework provides public administrations at national, regional and local level in the European Union with 47 recommendations to be more interoperable, allowing perfect interaction between them. No matter the borders. No matter the sectors. No matter the siloes. 
 
This is the task commissioned to the ISA² Programme, run by the Interoperability Unit at the Directorate of Digital Public Services that I have the honour to lead. Under the Directorate-General for Informatics (DG DIGIT) at the European Commission, the programme, running from 2016 to 2020, has the following goals: 
 
a) To ensure that interoperability activities are well coordinated at the EU level; 
b) To develop and operate solutions for public administrations based on businesses’ and citizens’ needs; 
c) To put in place the necessary instruments to boost interoperability at the EU and national level (such as the National Interoperability Framework Observatory (NIFO) in charge of the monitoring of the EIF implementation); 
 
We rely on our strong partnerships with with the EU Member States to learn about the challenges they face at digitising their public administrations and to identify the ways we can ease this process. 

If you want to let us know your views and help us shape the future digital public administrations, express your interest in our workshop and join us in October to discuss about how we could better boost digital public administrations in the EU. Our panel will include representatives of Member States' digitalisation departments, who will give us their insights on the digitalisation process they went through. 

Interested? Then click on this link, and choose the workshop on "ISA² Programme boosting digital public administrations in Europe" in the thematic cluster "Governance and administrative capacity". 
 
Stay tuned to learn more about how we are shaping Europe through interoperability!
 
Monday, 23 April, 2018