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Starting from the beginning of 2025, the upcoming Interoperable Europe Act (IEA) introduces mandatory interoperability assessments for the digital public services of European public administrations involving cross-border data exchange. This requirement (set out in Article 3 of the Act) will be applicable for the EU institutions, EU Member States, as well as for public administrations at the regional and local level.
In preparation for this, efforts to draft guidelines for these assessments have commenced, with the objective of establishing best practices that maximise benefits while minimising burdens for public administrations. As part of this process, EU public administrations are invited to participate in a pilot phase organised by the Unit for Interoperability and Digital Government of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Digital Services (DIGIT).
Below, our pilot project leaders address your queries regarding this initiative. You can sign up for the pilot by clicking on the following EU-survey. The general introductory article to the pilot can be found here.
Your Questions, Our Answers
1. How many resources are needed to be part of the pilot? How much time should the pilot participants block for the assessment?
Successful participation in the pilot will require you to fill out and hand in an interoperability assessment report. This will be done through a standardised form and by filling out a short questionnaire to reflect on the experience and to provide feedback on the tools provided.
The time and efforts needed to perform and document an assessment will depend on multiple factors:
- How complex is the use case that you have chosen? (see question “Which use case for the pilot should I choose?”)
- Are the requirements you want to assess already documented, or do they still need to be defined?
- Has your organisation already implemented the EIF or an interoperability framework based on the EIF?
For cases that the volunteer knows very well and that just need to be documented in the form of the assessment report, a couple of hours might be enough.
2. Which use case for the pilot should I choose?
You can choose a use case where an interoperability assessment would be required by law before deciding on binding requirements (see Art. 3 IEA). A ‘binding requirement’, as defined in Art. 2 (15) IEA, would be
- an obligation, prohibition, condition, criterion or limit
- of a legal, organisational, semantic or technical nature,
- which is set by a Union entity or a public sector body
- concerning one or more trans-European digital public services and
- which has an effect on cross-border interoperability
However, the pilot is not restricted to cases where an assessment is mandatory. It can be done for any other case, where such an assessment could be useful.
3. Does the assessment take the form of a standardised form, a methodological framework, an online tool...?
The pilot assessments will be supported by a pilot version of guidelines. The report will need to be provided in a standardised form, most likely in an EUsurvey.
4. How do you deal with multilingualism in the pilot?
English will be used as standard language for the pilot. This means you will receive all information, the guidelines and the survey in English. All documents can be automatically translated using e.g. eTranslation.
5. Are there any special skills (legal, technical) required to conduct the assessment?
No, there are no special skills needed to conduct the assessment. The assessment's goal is to analyse binding requirements for their effect on cross-border interoperability and on public or private stakeholders.
In other words, it requires that you analyse your (business) processes to see whether and where the binding requirement in question would/could affect the provision (design, procurement, development, implementation, delivery, etc.) of the trans-European digital public service. Your knowledge of these processes is therefore enough.
6. What sort of technical assistance and support will the European Commission provide during the pilot?
The Commission will provide the respective tool for filling out/handing in the report on the interoperability pilot assessments as well as the survey to be filled out about the experience. Throughout the process you can reach out to the team via: DIGIT-CIO-NETWORK@ec.europa.eu
7. How many details are necessary to declare interest to participate in the pilot?
You can declare your interest without already deciding on the use case that you would perform an interoperability assessment on.
If you have already decided on a use case for the short description in EUsurvey, you can keep your answers high-level. For the pilot, we are interested in learning about the challenges that you face when doing an interoperability assessment. This does not necessarily mean that we need to have all the details on all the cases that are part of the pilot. We are primarily interested in the information that helps us understand your challenges in the later process. Therefore, for the registration in the EU survey, high-level key words are enough. You can also leave it open and decide on the exact wording later, after reading the guidelines.
8. How does the European Commission ensure the protection of data and confidential information shared during the project?
The European Commission will only use tools that have been tested for their GDPR conformance, such as EUsurvey.
9. Can I give feedback that goes beyond the outcome of the assessment and that is more general?
Yes, you can. The questionnaire that will accompany the pilot will give room for broader feedback. On the process and your experience. You are also free to share your feedback with us by email or in the workshop.
10. What sort of consequences would follow from the results of the assessment? / Will the contribution to the pilot be public?
There will be no binding consequences that follow the result of your assessment. Your pilot assessment will not be public.
The pilot phase is running before the entry into force of Art. 3 IEA. Therefore, there is no legal obligation to publish an assessment report.
The input to the pilot will be provided only to the piloting team in the European Commission DG DIGIT B2 and JRC. In case of interest and after giving their consent, individual organisations and people participating in the pilot can be named explicitly or quoted in the accompanying JRC study report that is planned to be published.
11. Will there be a follow-up? / How will the outcomes of the pilots be used?
The piloting process of the interoperability assessment is closely accompanied by the Joint Research Center (JRC), which will publish a study report on the process and the main outcomes. Your input will go into this study report and help to refine the further iterations of these guidelines. You can furthermore attend a workshop to directly share your input with us on May 30th, 2024. Detailed information on this workshop will follow later.
12. Is the follow up workshop open to all?
No, the follow up workshop is just for those that handed in a report and filled out survey by end of May.
13. What is the relation with the existing maturity assessment tools SIQAT, GIQAT or IMAPS?
We are looking into how far these tools could also support future interoperability assessments. However, the kinds of assessments have a slightly different entry point (they evaluate specific services whereas IOP assess binding requirements) and we already notice today that adaptation would be needed. Should you be already using these tools today, we would be very interested to hear your ideas on their possible integration and use for the interoperability assessments of the future, also as feedback on your pilot experience.
14. Why start only in April?
We ask to start the pilots only in April because the pilot version of the guidelines will only be ready by the end of March. The official version of the guidelines is planned for adoption by the Interoperable Europe Board after its establishment towards the end of 2024.
15. Can I involve other stakeholders in the assessment?
Absolutely! Interoperability is a multi-disciplinary effort. Feel free to involve all relevant stakeholders that can help you to assess your project in question. If you are looking for inspiration, you can check out the Issue paper - Multidisciplinary teams for digital-ready policymaking_0.pdf (europa.eu)