European Journal of ePractice

The European Commission's eGovernment Action Plan considers innovations in eIdentification, interoperability and open source software to be keys to opening the door to the transformational potential of eGovernment. The developers of eGovernment services are therefore directing additional resources on these innovations as a means for providing high impact services. But will initiatives in these areas work? Will they facilitate the efficient and correct operation of public eServices? What does the evidence suggest?

The contributions to this special issue highlight the challenges confronting efforts to create these enabling conditions. Interoperability and appropriate identification systems are major challenges in their own right. As some contributions argue, open source can help some government agencies approach these goals, but it is only one of many strategies that need to be considered.

Professor Herbert Kubicek and Ralph Cimander point out the multifaceted nature of interoperability. Their analysis of good practice cases argues that the organization conditions for interoperability have been relatively neglected compared to the technical and semantic requirements. They present a useful model that suggests each of these dimensions of interoperability must be addressed from three perspectives simultaneously: politically, to negotiate among institutional actors; functionally, to align data, information and workflows effectively; and as a service to govern and regulate directories, formats, and the routing of messages.

Interoperability is also on focus at the case study of the European Services directive by Christian Breitenstrom and Jens Fromm, who point to the value of open source software (OSS). In their experience, OSS is not only a cost saving mechanism; it can also support communication and thereby help to achieve interoperability. Interoperability is also taken up by Sylvia Archmann and Just Castillo Iglesias, who argue that in order to succeed it requires the sharing of experiences and the development of communities of practice across Europe, key objectives of this journal.

The last two contributions focus on identification as a key to service delivery. The value of open source software is the major theme of Bud P. Bruegger, who concludes that this approach was necessary for the development of an eIdentification access control system, given the limited resources available for their project. He therefore sees open source as a major enabler. In contrast, based on their work in health services, Elena Sini, Paolo Locatelli, Nicola Restifo, and Michele Torresani focus on the use of a smart card and RFId for the integration of patient records and information across institutions.

This diverse set of contributions moves the debate about transformational eGovernment forward, by taking us one step back. They all show that there are no quick fixes to eGovernment. The key enablers themselves are technical, economic and organizational challenges that are intertwined in ways that make it difficult to attack single constraints. Interoperability, identification, open source and other enablers of eGovernment are closely interrelated. Together and separately, they need to be addressed and reconciled with countervailing concerns, such as over privacy and data protection.