The study on European Interoperability Infrastructure Services (EIIS) was published on 25 February 2010 by the Programme for the Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Business and Citizens (IDABC) of the European Commission.

With increasing requirements for cross-border communications between administrations and faced to limited funds, IDABC must bundle its efforts in support of interoperability between public sector organisations. This objective must be pursued in two ways, namely through increased work on technical, semantic, organisational and legal aspects of the cross-border communications and -in parallel - by putting in place infrastructure services that facilitate the establishment and the operation of European Public Services and by reusing existing modules and components.

The EIIS study identifies components of an interoperability infrastructure to support European Public Service and proposes a high-level roadmap for their implementation. The goal of the study is to prepare for the implementation of a coherent set of infrastructure components.

A strong focus is placed on the identification of the re-usable components and the logical organisation of this identified infrastructure services. Ample communication with the Member States and DG IRMs (Information Resource Managements - EIIS stakeholders) has been done along the study.

The elaboration process of the EIIS study comprises two steps:

• Study I: Study on operational infrastructure services. The purpose of Study I was to identify infrastructure services and modules of existing systems or systems in development that have a potential for providing generic service components within the context of a pan-European Interoperability infrastructure.
• Study II: Study on the potential to re-use systems and system components to provide generic infrastructure interoperability services.

Study I and II were respectively completed in 2009 and early 2010. The elaboration of Study II is made up of the following phases:

• Phase I: Preparation. The goal of this phase was to restructure the documentation available from Study I, and to complete the documentation where there was missing information. The end of this phase resulted in a reference EIIS list (i.e. the generic infrastructure services identified in the systems), and a high-level documentation of the systems documented and their components identified;
• Phase II: Detailed description of the EIIS. The key characteristics of the generic infrastructure services and their components have been described, and organised in a logical model. The proposal of this EIIS Model was presented on ePractice.eu and the feedback of stakeholders has been collected to subsequently refine the EIIS Model;
• Phase III: Option for implementation. Starting from the EIIS Model, the study identified a small set of implementation options for the EIIS. Those options cover the build, the deployment and the maintenance. The options were presented and discussed with the EIIS stakeholders in a workshop. The implementation priority has been proposed by the business cases. A high-level roadmap for implementation of each infrastructure service has been defined.

Further Information:

• Original source - IDABC programme website
• EU: European Interoperability Infrastructure Services (EIIS) - Final Report Study II - ePractice library