Below you can find a list of the 10 generic recommendations grouped under their respective barriers. To read more about each one of them, click on the [Read more] links.
Generic recommendations 1 to 3 presented below aim at addressing the Organisational Barrier
Public administrations rely on IT solutions of different sizes and complexity to carry out their day-to-day work. Traditionally, they have designed, procured and maintained their IT solutions. This is true at cross-border level and within countries, especially in Member States organised in federal or decentralised structures of government... [Read more]
Both European and national legislation often specify common high-level needs as well as technical and semantic (data) requirements or specifications. However, these are rarely accompanied by the description of elements, such as lower-level collaboration structures and workflows, data models etc., which could be used by administrations either when developing new or migrating existing IT solutions... [Read more]
Budget fragmentation and shrinking budgets make it more difficult for public administrations to co-create/develop IT solutions together. The individual administration’s mandate usually does not include creating value for other administrations and this is an additional reason for the limited appeal of joint development. Another challenge is relinquishing old applications with multiple (inter)dependencies... [Read more]
Generic recommendations 4 & 5 presented below aim at addressing the Legal Barrier
Uncertainty with regard to the liability exposure of relevant stakeholders and the infringement of property rights assigned through, for example, copyright and patents, negatively impact the sharing and reuse of IT solutions... [Read more]
When procuring IT solutions, public administrations are often restricted by compatibility requirements of existing proprietary interfaces, systems and data formats or they simply underestimate the benefits of relying on open specifications and standards... [Read more]
Generic recommendations 6 & 7 presented below aim at addressing the Technical Barrier
To provide better services to citizens, businesses and other administrations, public administrations are continuously increasing the scope and volume of information exchange with each other, across both borders and sectors. To facilitate these exchanges, the need for common solution building blocks in Europe is more pressing than ever... [Read more]
An IT solution’s technical characteristics are important when assessing its reusability. Its internal architecture and the technologies it uses also have a huge impact here. For instance, it is often very costly or even impossible to take a system built for a specific purpose and adjust it to satisfy slightly different business needs... [Read more]
Generic recommendations 8 to 10 presented below aim at addressing the Communication Barrier
For a public administration to reuse another administration’s IT solution, it should first know that the solution exists, where it is located, and then trust that it is safe, technically mature and documented enough to be reused... [Read more]
One of the underlying principles of the European Interoperability Framework is that public administrations should take multilingualism into account when developing the internal structure and documentation of IT solutions in order to improve their potential to be reused across borders... [Read more]
For sharing and reuse to become the rule, a cultural shift needs to happen in the public sector. Sharing an IT solution should become the default approach. However, there are circumstances where public administrations may be understandably reluctant to participate in the collaborative development of IT solutions... [Read more]