The Interoperable Europe act: What should public sector leaders know?

The new EU Interoperable Europe Act, which entered into force in April 2024, is explicitly geared towards closing this gap by establishing what the EC describes as a “new cooperation framework between Member States and the Commission to work together on matters relating to cross-border interoperability and digital public services”.

Interoperability means seamless interaction between different authorities and their IT systems. It will enable the public sector to carry out administrative procedures more digitally, and in accordance with the once-only principle.

With the Interoperable Europe Act, the EU has established the first common legal framework for cross-border interoperability. The regulation addresses authorities both at the European level and within the Member States regarding trans-European digital public services. What does the Act mean for the European public sector? How far has Europe progressed towards its interoperability goal – and what more needs to be done? In this article we take stock of the journey to date, the objectives and anticipated benefits of interoperability, and what the Interoperable Europe Act means for public service organizations as they strive towards the EU’s Digital Decade 2030 policy program ambitions.

What are the objectives of interoperability?

At a purely national level, the interoperable design of digital public services is a complex undertaking for public administrations. Now it has also become a cross-border challenge, primarily due to the Single Digital Gateway Regulation, but also because of bilateral and multilateral agreements in areas such as taxation law. The EU’s goal of making key public services 100% available online — part of the Digital Decade 2030 policy program  — is creating additional implementation pressure.

Let’s continue by asking ‘why?’. Why is the EU intent on interoperability? What benefits will it bring? The EC is clear on this point, citing “an obvious reduction in cost, time, energy and unnecessary administrative burden for citizens, businesses and the public sector itself“. We can break this down as follows:

• Citizens – making life easier for everyone with seamless access to high quality end-to-end digital public services, wherever a person chooses to live, study, or work in the EU.
• Business – fostering growth by enabling entrepreneurs and businesses to reach an integrated market and operate seamlessly across borders.
• Government – promoting greater reuse and sharing of information and solutions between administrations to speed up digital service design, foster innovation, and ensure Europe’s competitiveness on the global stage through faster delivery of outcomes to citizens and businesses.

Estimated cost savings alone amount to €5 billion per year, according to an EC impact assessment.

The journey so far

To date, European coordination of interoperability has been largely informal and non-binding. For example, the  European Interoperability Framework (EIF) has set out a commonly agreed approach since 2010 (current version updated in 2017) built on the four layers of legal, semantic, technical and organizational readiness – see ‘How do you make all this happen’, below.  

Despite all efforts, however, the EC has identified an insufficient level of interoperability in the European public sector, which impedes the digitalization ambitions outlined above. Against this backdrop, the EC recognized the need for legislative action and submitted a proposal for a regulation in 2022 – the Interoperable Europe Act. As Figure 1 illustrates, public service organizations must act now or risk failing to meet the timeline. And, importantly, as a directly applicable EU regulation, the Act places the development and use of the EIF on a legal footing.

What does the new Regulation mean for you?

The Regulation brings two key obligations for Europe’s public sector organizations and their leaders:

• An obligation to share interoperability solutions that support trans-European digital public services. Interoperability solutions embody all reusable resources that relate to legal, organizational, semantic or technical requirements (e.g., guidelines, specifications, IT applications).
• An obligation to assess (from 2025) the impact on cross-border interoperability prior to any decision on new or substantially modified binding requirements (obligations, prohibitions, restrictions, etc. of a legal, organizational, semantic or technical nature) in relation to trans-European digital public services. Stakeholder and user perspectives will also be consulted during these checks. 

How do you make all this happen?

Public sector organizations need to rectify, clarify, connect, and harmonize key aspects of how they achieve interoperability-by-design. How? By using the EIF approach to interoperability built on the four layers of legal, semantic, technical, and organizational readiness.

This holistic cooperation concept (Fig. 2) sees the EIF providing conceptual guidance to help public bodies achieve interoperability-by-design. The layers influence each other, with the legal layer fundamentally shaping design decisions on the others (see, for example, the relationship between legal terms and semantic interoperability).

With governance underpinning all four layers of the EIF, it is no surprise that the Interoperable Europe Act institutionalizes a multi-level governance structure. This has an Interoperable Europe Board at its center to facilitate strategic cooperation on interoperability issues and the implementation of the legal Act.

Steps to assure governance

The Interoperable Europe Board is chaired by the EC and each Member State is represented once. However, public, private, academic and civil society stakeholders can also participate in an advisory capacity within the new interoperability governance via the Interoperable Europe Community.

There are certain requirements, as follows:

• For implementation in the Member States, national competent authorities must be designated and adequately equipped, one of them as a single point of contact.
• Interoperability coordinators for European Union entities are required if these bodies are regulating, providing, or managing trans-European digital public services.

What help is available to accelerate interoperability efforts?

So-called “Interoperable Europe support measures” are intended to promote the development of interoperability solutions. These include:

• The Interoperable Europe Board can propose policy implementation support projects to the Commission. Such projects should support public sector bodies in the implementation of European policies with relevance to cross-border interoperability.
• Interoperability-related innovation measures to support the development and uptake of innovative interoperability solutions, including a possible  involvement of GovTechs.
• Interoperability regulatory sandboxes can be leveraged for controlled environments as innovation playgrounds – this idea is conceptually convergent with the AI Act, which was created at the same time as the Interoperable Europe Act and provides for regulatory sandboxes as innovation playgrounds, too.  Among other things, interoperability regulatory sandboxes may also enable the development of an open European GovTech ecosystem.
• Voluntary peer reviews by experts from different Member States are a further support measure, as are training courses and certifications by the EC.

Recommendations for action

The regulation should be welcomed not only because of the estimated cost savings of 5 billion euros per year but because it also closes a gap in European administrative digitalization law. Reasonably, it does so by focusing on governance and procedural rules instead of setting substantive requirements for solution designs. This gives digitalization actors at all administrative levels sufficient leeway to design and further develop requirements in line with needs and the state of the art on the basis of the EIF. The regulation moreover sets the course for a genuine European interoperability ecosystem – with obvious potential for synergies with existing initiatives that include the Global Government Technology Centre Berlin.

Our view and recommendations include:

• The overall governance structure should be considered as a great opportunity to shape interoperability at the European and national level. Member States, public authorities and other stakeholders like businesses should actively engage within this new collaboration ecosystem.
• Interoperability assessments should be seen as a major step forward. Although negative assessment results have no legal consequences, the mandatory undertaking at an early stage alone will have a sensitizing effect and thus contribute to interoperability-by-design.
• In non-mandatory cases (e.g., non-binding requirements or requirements for non-cross-border public services), voluntary interoperability checks should be considered to promote coherence, quality and, where appropriate, subsequent trans-European scalability.
• The checks should be designed to be as efficient, user-centered and unbureaucratic as possible. To this end, we recommend the participation of authorities and other stakeholders in respective consultation initiatives.
• National processes, tools, and guidelines should be adjusted and specified in accordance with the Act and the EIF. National refinements of the EIF can also create added value for Member States.

Conclusion – the need for interdisciplinary expertise

Even the best centrally provided tools do not change the fact that conducting interoperability checks remains a case-by-case task. It usually requires much more effort than just “ticking off checklists” and necessitates a high level of interdisciplinary expertise and methodological skills. Holistic interoperability advisory with cross-domain (legal, semantic, organizational, IT) approaches, such as legal engineering, can help with this by evaluating the various interoperability levels and their interaction comprehensively.

As a European company, we are fully supportive of the Interoperable Europe Act, and we are helping public sector bodies to take the next step towards compliance. We work with our clients to connect government across different layers and to enhance cross-border collaboration in the public sector through both dialog and practical action. Our work on interoperability checks might involve:

• Using better-regulation tools to reveal potential for optimizing legal rules (e.g., domain-specific laws, regulations, administrative rules, etc.) in a way that promotes interoperability.
• Conducting legal landscaping to analyze all relevant regulations and to map them to affected elements in the various interoperability levels.
• Developing data models (by using ontologies and knowledge graphs) to systematically record and visualize relationships. This makes it easier to analyze data flows and standards, for example in relation to semantic interoperability.
• Evaluating organizational interoperability (e.g., by means of process modelling and analyses) and technical interoperability (e.g., with the help of open specifications).
• Carrying out an overall interoperability maturity analysis involving the necessary stakeholders.

We ensure high-quality and compliant reports on interoperability checks, including implementation-orientated recommendations.

Act now – find out more

Overall, public authorities are doing the right thing if they familiarize themselves with the requirements of the Interoperable Europe Act and the EIF, identify interoperability as a strategic field of action, and prepare for interoperability checks.

With the 2025 timeline for compliance approaching fast, those authorities yet to begin this journey, or that are still at dialog stage, must act now.

To set up your organization for the future and save time, feel free to contact us if you seek guidance on Interoperable Europe Act requirements or interoperability in general.