Developing Cross-border E-Governance: Exploring Interoperability and Cross-border Integration

Abstract

The recent policy and regulatory initiatives of the EU, such as Digital Single Market Strategy, Single Digital Gateway, European Interoperability Framework and eIDAS, identify the need for digital cross-border integration in the EU. The achievement of the digital single market within the EU is challenging governments at all levels to transform or update their governance systems in order to establish the cross-border e-governance. The existing stage models in the e-Government literature, do not address the cross-border integration in the evolution phase of the e-Government. The heterogeneity and the legacy systems of the cross-border data exchange infrastructures hinders the process of seamless cross-border data exchange. This heterogeneity of cross-border data exchange infrastructures and complexity of the cross-border integration in the EU requires high level of interoperability in the legal, organisational, technical and semantic environment. Therefore, we explore the cross-border data infrastructures and its state of play in the EU by following the predominant framework that ensures the interoperability of the digital public services, EIF. We found that the most successful approach for cross-border e-governance and the cross-border integration might be the federated approach.

GLASS: A Citizen-Centric Distributed Data-Sharing Model within an e-Governance Architecture

“…An e-Governance solution primarily focuses on providing a transparent, efficient and coherent service to the citizens [19,20]. It can connect various entities, such as citizens, government agencies, and trusted institutions into a single domain.…”

“…Sharma et al [21] define that these types of approaches to improved e-governance are crucial for improving the bureaucratic relationship between the government, citizens, and policymakers and enforce accountability in governance processes by improving public access to information and transparency. Krimmer et al [22] define that a key factor of achieving a digital single market requires a strong focus on cross-border integration with the development of e-governance approaches.…”

The Power of Many: Securing Organisational Identity Through Distributed Key Management

“…Securing such a system requires identifying the individual organisations to allow authenticity and integrity of the shared data. Data exchange systems enable secure interoperable cross-organisation data exchange between separately built information systems in e-governance and other industries [2, 17,18]. The examples of commercial, worldwide used systems are X-Road [22], UXP [10], and Dawex Data Exchange Platform, European Gaia-X [1]; while Dutch NLX [30] and Australian Secure Data Exchange application are national.…”

GLASS: A Citizen-Centric Distributed Data-Sharing Model within an e-Governance Architecture

“…An e-Governance solution primarily focuses on providing a transparent, efficient and coherent service to the citizens [ 20 , 21 ]. It can connect various entities, such as citizens, government agencies, and trusted institutions into a single domain.…”

“…Sharma et al [ 22 ] define that these types of approaches to improved e-governance are crucial for improving the bureaucratic relationship between the government, citizens, and policymakers and enforce accountability in governance processes by improving public access to information and transparency . Krimmer et al [ 23 ] define that a key factor of achieving a digital single market requires a strong focus on cross-border integration with the development of e-governance approaches.…”