Connecting Europe. Get-on-board! From the e-SENS pilots to reality

On 2-3 March 2017, as the coordinator of the European project “Electronic Simple European Network Services” (e-SENS) for Luxembourg, the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) participated in the conference dedicated to digital public services in Europe: "Connecting Europe. Get-on-board! From the e-SENS pilots to reality."

This conference organised in Brussels (BE) in cooperation with the European Commission was the closing event of e-SENS project - aiming at improving access to public services within EU and at supporting the development of the digital single market.

e-SENS’ promising results

During two days, speakers and participants who came from 30 countries, have been taken on a journey charting the remarkable progress of the European collaboration. They showed their support to the project’s successful completion and the move from the earliest pilot services to the emerging ‘live’ phases of cross-border digital public services. More cross-border interactions are now becoming possible in diverse areas such as e-Health, e-Justice, e-Procurement, business lifecycle and many more.

e-SENS succeeded in creating a common pan-European set of standards that will embrace both national and sectorial diversity. The coherent Interoperability Architecture developed by the project includes models, tools, specifications and guidelines for the implementation of the solutions.

The project demonstrated that it is feasible, realistic and sustainable to deploy Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) services within and among European countries by implementing common building blocks to connect diversified national IT systems. e-SENS’ outputs provided the foundation for the platform of “core services”, for the eGovernment cross-border digital infrastructure within the Connecting Europe Facility, ensuring further promotion of interoperable solutions.

What’s next?

New digital public services will be developed with a recently launched project.  The “Only-One” principle (TOOP) project is a new Large Scale Pilot project part of the EU eGovernment Action Plan 2016-2020 that will contribute towards increasing the efficiency of the Digital Single Market.

TOOP aims to explore and demonstrate the “once-only” principle through three sustainable pilots: Cross-border e-Services for Business Mobility, Updating Connected Company Data and Online Ship and Crew Certificates. TOOP will consider the existing EU frameworks (EIRA, EIF) and the reuse of the common IT components (Building Blocks) developed by the e-SENS project and operated as Digital Services Infrastructures of the Connecting Europe Facility.