The European Commission has approved a proposal for a decision of the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers on a new programme for the period 2010–15 under the name “Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations” (ISA). The program responds to the need of cooperation and communication in order to establish and promote commonly agreed solutions to avoid e-barriers at national borders.

In recent years Member States have gradually transformed their administrations to provide public services electronically so that citizens and businesses can communicate fast and easily with their national administrations. Given that EU citizens are free to work in, and re-locate to, any EU Member State and companies carry out business across the EU, Member States need to communicate with each other to serve the citizens and businesses in the best possible way.

When setting up electronic public services to cut red tape and make communication with administrations faster and easier, Member States have mainly been considering the national dimension. However, to serve citizens and businesses in a Europe of mobility, Member States need to be able to communicate seamlessly across borders. Solutions developed without coordination at EU level may prove incompatible and unable to “talk” to each other. This is where the ISA programme steps in.

ISA Programme will be implemented over the period 2010-2015, and will focus on providing cross-border solutions for public administrations by making available common frameworks, common services and generic tools and promoting reuse as well as exchange of experience and good practices.

EU actions to promote Interoperability and Communication between Administrations

ISA is the follow-on programme to the IDABC programme “Interoperable delivery of pan-European e-government services to administrations, businesses and citizens”, which comes to an end in December 2009, and fell under the eEurope 2005 and i2010 initiatives. The IDABC programme was itself launched in January 2005 as the successor of the IDA programme “Interchange of data between administrations”.

The IDABC and IDA programmes have clearly provided added value to the exchange of information between administrations compared to what could have been obtained from a separate and uncoordinated approach.

The ISA programme will be based on the achievements of the IDA and IDABC programmes and will, as its predecessors, contribute to the further development and implementation of the European e-government strategy.