Uneven progress in joining up European eGovernment systems

08 March 2006

Europe's governments are making varying progress in joining up data capture and management systems, writes Stephen Gardner. European eGovernment specialists looking for examples of back office good practice would do well to follow one simple piece of advice: look north.  The Scandinavian countries consistently come out top in surveys of eGovernment development and have a deserved trailblazing reputation. Scandinavian progress results from a bottom up approach, building the infrastructure and focusing on back office capabilities first so that the front end has a solid foundation.  A strong cross-government direction in data capture and data management is central to this. Sweden for example has a strategy of removing legal barriers to inter-agency sharing of data and to supply of data from third parties, meaning that forms can be pre-populated and citizens become verifiers of information, rather than suppliers of information in the first place. Steps to incrementally remove legal obstacles were taken as early as 1987.  At the same time, a move is encouraged, where possible, away from face to face meetings and handwritten communications to what is known in Sweden as 'technical meetings'.  Olov Östberg, Senior Advisor at the Swedish Administrative Development Agency, says “All agencies are striving for data capture in such a form that very little manual work has to be added.” Swedish tax facts The most data hungry Swedish agency is the tax office, and it is here that the results can be clearly seen.  Swedish law requires banks, insurance companies and other organisations to provide details about assets held by citizens and businesses.  The tax office pre-fills both paper and online forms with this information. This means the Tax Office must handle 80 million income statements from different third parties in a two month filing window each year, says Agneta Nord, Business Developer at the Swedish Tax Agency.  “We show the taxpayer what information we got from third parties.  The taxpayer must check it, and correct the return if something is wrong.”  2.1 million of Sweden's 7.2 million taxpayers filed online last year. This concept of pre-populated 'tax proposals' relying on third party information originated in the Nordic countries and is now established in Denmark, Estonia, Finland and Norway as well as Sweden.  But it can only happen where appropriate legislation is combined with public acceptance. “The Scandinavian countries are probably the most advanced in joining-up the back office,” says François-Xavier Chevallerau, independent eGovernment consultant and author of the monumental study eGovernment in the Member States of the European Union, published by the European Commission in November 2005.  “They started focusing on back-office reorganisation early in the 1990s and have fewer legal restrictions on data sharing between government bodies than most other European countries.” For others, the approach is more incremental, with systems being introduced in particular areas or for particular departments. The Netherlands for example is in the process of setting up six key registers (natural persons, companies, land, addresses, buildings and maps) that will enable once-only data provision by citizens and businesses and joined-up working across the back office.  At the front end the system will be supported by the Burgerpin (Citizen PIN) identification and authentication services. Irish carrots In Ireland, carrots rather than sticks are being employed.  Ireland's public services integration agency, known as Reach, is building a gateway that will use a PIN based system to give 'level 1' authentication by checking users against information held in the Department of Social and Family Affairs database.  The gateway can then pass users through to other departments and agencies who can implement higher levels of authentication if necessary. “We're sitting between the customer and government departments and providing services such as authentication, forms and messaging,” says P J Leavy, Reach's Service Delivery Manager.  “We will have a forms engine and intend to pre-populate forms with data for level 1 users.”  Pre-filled data is likely to be fairly elementary, however, such as name and address details. The first big rollout of the gateway system will take place in April and May this year, when Ireland's PAYE tax services go fully online.  The Irish government hopes that this will serve as an example to other departments and services, which will begin to connect to the gateway. For other countries, however, such as France and Germany, legal barriers mean that, for the time being, data sharing with third parties and even between government departments is a distant dream.  “In these countries,” says François-Xavier Chevallerau, “Government bodies are encouraged to use common building blocks developed centrally, such as content management systems or e-payment platforms.  But this does not entail data sharing and joint working.” Nevertheless, although for many countries the road to joined-up data capture and management may be rockier than it is in Scandinavia, Europe's northern pioneers have many lessons to teach. A version of this article was published in Government Computing magazine.

 

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