Description (short summary)

The primary audience for this report are decision makers, such as Chief Information Officers (CIOs), strategy experts and project officers of the European Union Member States or the European Union Institutions who are involved in the establishment of European Public Services. This document is also more generally targeted to all stakeholders involved in European Public Services: managers, suppliers, and policy analysts.

As the European Commission has pointed out, a strong drive is needed for gaining commitment to transform and modernise public services in Europe. This transformation should be achieved by avoiding creating barriers to the Internal Market. For this challenging transformation to be successful, cross-border European Public Services’ interoperability needs to be addressed at the European level.

Currently, the level of European Public Services’ interoperability is not ideal. The importance of interoperability is not sufficiently recognised and the level of awareness around interoperability issues is not adequate. Issues are not only technological, but cover a wide range of aspects, ranging from a lack of a cross borders and cross sectors legal basis for interoperability to a lack of communication, from a lack of awareness and political will to a lack of agreements on the governance structures required, from a lack of agreements on data formats to a lack of agreements on semantics.

The diversity of European Public Services granularity needs to be taken into consideration. Not only have public services in the European Union a diverse reach – from regional to local, sector-specific to cross-border services, they also serve very different needs within different scopes.

Today, government at all levels in the European Union are committed to transform and modernise the public services they deliver. But in order to achieve a user centric public services transformation within the European Single Market and to realise the four freedoms, cross-border European Public Services’ interoperability needs to be addressed at the European level. For this reason, a systematic approach to the governance of interoperability at EU-level is needed, specifying concrete goals and objectives, mobilising the necessary resources to achieve these goals and objectives and monitoring progress towards these goals and objectives.

Number of pages: 56

ISBN Number: N/A

Description of license: N/A

Nature of documentation: Official reports and studies