THEMIS: Managing infringements made easier

Just before Christmas, the THEMIS/Infringements app was launched on 8 December 2020, making Member States’ and colleagues’ lives much easier when dealing with infringement cases. The units in charge of ‘implementation and enforcement of EU Law’ and ‘digital solutions and process efficiency’ within the Secretariat-General of the European Commission explain the advantages of the new IT system.

What is THEMIS/Infringements?
THEMIS/Infringements is a new online application that thousands of users are using to manage infringements of EU Law:

• Member States to reply to infringement cases or to notify their transposition measures;
• Directorates-General (DGs) for their transposition check and to prepare their infringement cases;
• Legal Service to encode their agreement on a case;
• Secretariat-General for the adoption of the regular infringement cycles;
• Cabinets to validate the list of proposals of their DGs for each infringement cycle.

It truly is an all-in-one application. It supports all the steps of the infringement procedure, which is crucial right now, as enforcement is one of our priorities.  As we often say, our EU legislation is only as good as its correct implementation! THEMIS/Infringements helps us achieve that. 
 

How does it improve the previous system?
It was high time we replaced the old system (called NIF), which was outdated and not very user-friendly. The old system was mainly a repository of documents. With THEMIS/Infringements, we integrated this part of the Commission's work into other corporate tools, such as the Commission’s decision-making system Decide Consultation and in the future, we will integrate it into Decide Decision. The look and feel is also much nicer and easier to navigate through.
 

How does it make colleagues’ life easier?
It makes life easier for Commission colleagues but also for Member States. 

Colleagues who deal with infringements in DGs now manage their whole infringement case in THEMIS/Infringements: they create a proposal for a decision, launch an interservice consultation, submit the case to their Cabinets for validation and send it to the Secretariat-General for adoption during one of the infringement cycles. 

All of their infringement cases are stored on the application, with easy search and export functions. They are also able to consult and assess Member States' transposition measures and if necessary, open an infringement case directly, should they find that a Directive has not been correctly transposed in a Member State. It is very useful to have all the functionalities for infringements in one place.

What were the key challenges in getting THEMIS/Infringements ready for launch in December? 
Being able to launch in December has really been the result of great teamwork; colleagues involved from the beginning and some who joined the team recently, the IT developers, the team of trainers relentlessly training future users,… But credit must also go to everyone who tested and suggested ideas for improvement, and of course all the colleagues in DGs and Member States without whose feedback we would not have been able to make THEMIS/Infringements better.

Work has been intense in the last few weeks of 2020 to transfer 66,000 infringement cases from the old database to the new application, making last-minute improvements to the lay-out, etc. 

Of course, just like with any IT application, glitches can happen, but we are confident that everything will work fine and all our users will have a great experience with the new application.