The quiet factor that determines whether GovTech actually works

Author: Eirini Gkoni

Interoperability assessment as a foundation for sustainable and reusable digital services      

If you ask ten people what "interoperability" means,  you'll get ten different shrugs. It sounds like the kind of word invented specifically to drain the energy out of a good idea. And yet, if you spend enough time inside European public sector innovation projects, you start to notice something: interoperability isn't the boring part of GovTech. It's the entire plot.

Here's why.

The trap every pilot falls into  

Almost every promising public sector pilot starts the same way. Someone identifies a real problem, builds a clever solution, tests it in one place, and it works beautifully. Citizens are happier. Staff save time. Everyone nods approvingly in the final workshop.

And then someone asks the question that quietly determines whether any of it mattered: can this move?

Can it be picked up by a ministry two countries away that uses different systems, different legal frameworks, different languages, and a completely different IT department's Tuesday mood? If the honest answer is "not without rebuilding it from scratch," then what you've built isn't a solution — it's a beautifully engineered dead end.

This is precisely the question a structured interoperability assessment forces projects to confront early, rather than discovering it the hard way three years and one budget cycle later. 

Four questions for digital service effectiveness across Europe  

Under the European Interoperability Framework and the Interoperable Europe Act, evaluating whether a digital public solution is genuinely reusable comes down to four deceptively simple lines of inquiry:

Does it actually serve the people who need it? Not "does it have a nice interface," but was it shaped, tested, and adjusted with real users and real administrations from day one — the difference between designing for citizens and designing at them.

Can someone else pick it up without asking your permission every step of the way? Open standards, open licences, documented APIs, published source code — the unglamorous plumbing that turns "we built this" into "you can build on this too."

Is it safe enough to trust with real data? GDPR compliance and cybersecurity aren't a box to tick at the end; they're what determines whether an administration in another country is even allowed to consider your solution, let alone adopt it.

Is anyone going to still be maintaining this in three years? The single most common way good GovTech dies isn't bad design — it's the absence of a plan for who keeps the lights on after the funding ends.

What's striking, watching a whole portfolio of pilots get measured against these four questions at roughly the same early stage of maturity, is how consistently uneven the results are — and how instructive that unevenness is. A solution can be dazzlingly reusable and technically open, and still be sitting on unfinished security groundwork. Another can have textbook data protection instincts baked in from the start, while its openness documentation still lives mostly in someone's head. Nobody arrives at "fully interoperable" by accident, and almost nobody arrives there on the first attempt.

The uncomfortable honesty of a baseline  

There's something almost refreshing about a compliance report that isn't trying to declare victory. A first-round interoperability assessment, done properly, isn't a scoreboard — it's a mirror. It tells a project, plainly: here's where the reusability groundwork is already solid, here's where the security story is still being written, here's where "we'll document that later" needs to become "we're documenting that now."

A few patterns tend to repeat across almost any early-stage portfolio like this:

Security and privacy work lags behind functional development — understandably, since it's hard to finalize a GDPR assessment for a system that's still changing shape. But it's also the piece that quietly gates everything else: no administration adopts a tool it can't yet trust with citizen data.

Openness is often more advanced in practice than it is on paper. Teams build on open standards instinctively, then forget to document why, which matters enormously to the next administration trying to evaluate whether to reuse the work.

Sustainability planning is the orphan of early-stage projects. Everyone's focused on making the thing work; almost no one wants to be the one asking "who owns this once the grant ends?"

True cross-border reuse — a solution genuinely running in more than one country — remains currently the rare exception rather than the rule. Which is precisely why it's worth celebrating loudly whenever it happens, and treating it as the model to reverse-engineer rather than the fluke to admire from a distance.

What work package 3 (WP3) in GovTech4All 2.0 is actually trying to do  

It's worth naming, plainly, what all this measuring is in service of. Within GovTech4All 2.0, this work sits inside Work Package 3 — Scalability and Reusability of Interoperable Solutions — and its job is deceptively narrow on paper: take pilots that already work in one place and prepare them to work everywhere else.

That breaks down into four commitments, not four checkboxes:

Make interoperability a design choice, not an afterthought. WP3 provides hands-on support so that every pilot is interoperable by design from the start, aligned with the Interoperable Europe Act, rather than retrofitted for cross-border use after the fact.

Test reusability, don't assume it. Which components of a solution can actually be lifted out and adapted elsewhere, and which were quietly built for one specific administration's quirks? Someone has to ask that question deliberately, pilot by pilot.

Make sure the right people find out these solutions exist. A brilliant, reusable tool that nobody outside its home country has heard of has solved half a problem. WP3 includes an active promotion effort aimed at public administrations and GovTech peers across the EU.

Write it all down somewhere other people can find it. The work culminates in a catalogue of solutions — technical documentation, implementation guidelines, best practices — so the next administration facing a familiar problem doesn't have to start the conversation from zero.

The interoperability assessment described above is essentially WP3's diagnostic tool: the mechanism by which "interoperable by design" gets checked against reality, early enough to still do something about the gaps it finds.

Why interoperability matters  

It's tempting to measure GovTech success by the shine of a launch event. But the real test comes later, quietly, when a civil servant in an entirely different country stumbles across a solution built somewhere else and asks: could we actually use this?

Whether the answer is yes depends almost entirely on decisions made long before that moment — decisions about licensing, about documentation, about data protection, about who's still around to provide support eighteen months from now. None of that shows up in a demo. All of it shows up in an interoperability assessment.

That's the unglamorous, essential work happening right now across a cluster of European public sector pilots: not just building useful  things, but building things honestly measured against whether they can travel. The scores aren't the story. The trajectory is.