The document at hand introduces the  European Statistical System Enterprise Architecture Reference Framework (ESS EARF) to support the implementation of the ESS Vision 2020 on which the European Statistical System Committee agreed in May 2014 as the guiding frame for ESS developments up to 2020.

The ESS Vision 2020 has laid down the basis for cooperation in the ESS on modernizing the production and dissemination of ESS statistics and has outlined the future business strategy in response to a set of common challenges identified.

The ESS Vision 2020 explicitly called for the establishment of an ESS Enterprise Architecture as a Reference Framework by presenting the adoption of a “Common Reference Enterprise Architecture” as one of its implementation elements.

The ESS Vision 2020 describes Enterprise Architecture as “a systematic language to describe the way our business wants to operate and how the various components fit together. It serves to translate our vision into implementation strategies and priorities in a systematic way. It will be based on principles of standardization and interoperability, reuse, statistical subject matter domain-independent standard processes, metadata driven business chains and service-oriented data-based outputs of statistical processes.”[1]

[1] Excerpt from ESS Vision 2020