1. Enhance cross-organisation coordination		3. Adopt business models that facilitate sharing and reuse

 Collaborate to identify common needs

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

While these IT needs and requirements may be the same in various countries or organisations, collaborative development and the reuse of IT solutions can be hampered by the fact that public administrations are often not aware of this.

Generally, public administrations’ lack of awareness of others’ IT needs hinders the identification of generic requirements, thus limiting the possibility of collaborating on the development of common IT solutions.

2.1. Communicate your needs

 

A key factor in the successful development of common and broadly reused IT solutions is the extent to which they meet, or can be adjusted to, the business needs of various organisations.

In order to increase awareness about existing needs and requirements, public administrations should communicate those to other public administrations and potential vendors as early as possible in the process. This will facilitate the alignment of development work.

2.2. Define sets of requirements supporting common business processes

Public administrations across borders and sectors should work together to identify business processes serving common needs and subsequently define common sets of requirements for IT solutions implementing those business processes.

2.3. Identify generic functionalities that can be used in multiple solutions

Public administrations should work together to identify generic functionalities, such as a set of abilities or functions, which can be implemented as common building blocks and reused in various IT solutions; for example, single sign-on, document transfer, archiving, etc. See recommendation 6 for further information on building blocks.

 

Recommended measures for central bodies

Provide a Forum where public administrations can exchange information Central bodies should establish and maintain a forum where public administrations can exchange information about their needs, requirements and existing or planned IT solutions. Support the harmonisation of business processes when implementing new legislation Central bodies should identify, describe and publish common business processes for IT solutions that will implement new policies or legislation, in order to reduce implementation time and effort. The common processes should be made public by the time the legislation is adopted.