استاندارد ICT و تأمین تجهیزات عمومی در ایالات متحده و در اتحادیه اروپا: نفوذ در استقرار دولت الکترونیک

Most governments have regarded interoperability as one of the key enablers of egovernment. If interoperability was achieved, the vision of an integrated provision of public services to both citizens and businesses by means of the information and communications technologies (ICT) regardless of the number and type of departments involved in the provision could be realized. This paper analyses two factors that may influence egovernment interoperability: standardisation and public procurement. The paper analyses the policy and legal framework setup by these factors and checks whether egovernment deployment have been influenced by them or not. The analysis is focused on the cases of the United States federal government and of the European Union institutions and Member States administrations.

During late 1990s, most governments in OECD countries released their egovernment strategies. In the strategies, a common vision was presented where an integrated provision of public services to both citizens and businesses by means of the information and communications technologies (ICT) may be realized, regardless of the number and type of departments involved in the provision. In order to fulfil this vision, egovernment strategies have been supported by several policies, namely security, confidentiality, delivery channels, etc. One of such policies is the interoperability policy (CEC, 2002; OECD, 2003). Interoperability can be defined as “the ability to exchange information and mutually to use the information which has been exchanged”, according to the European Commission (CEC, 1991). But more technical definitions are found in the literature, such as the following one: “Interoperability is the ability to exchange functionality and interpretable data between two software entities. It can be defined in terms of four enabling requirements: communications, request generation, data format and semantics” (Mowbray & Zahavi, 1995), where the definition goes into detail enumerating the sort of requirements that interoperability must tackle. Many interoperability policies have been implemented by means of interoperability frameworks. An interoperability framework is a tool designed for facilitating interoperability. The recipients of the interoperability frameworks are those agencies that are engaged in egovernment initiatives. And the final aim of an interoperability framework is to make easy the integrated provision of services to both citizens and businesses by means of egovernment. Interoperability frameworks have been produced by a large amount of egovernment agencies around the world. At least, an interoperability framework contains a technical standard catalogue. A technical standard catalogue lists those standards that are recommended for the deployment of egovernment systems within the public administration. The standards that can be incorporated in some catalogues are required to be developed by standardisation bodies, but other catalogues do include any standard which has wide market acceptance. Guijarro (2005) discusses thoroughly this issue. In addition to the technical standard catalogue, some interoperability frameworks also state policies, guidelines and best practices. This paper investigates how egovernment interoperability policy implementation relates to the context of broader government policies. The paper focuses on two policies: standardisation policy and public procurement policy. The rationale of the analysis undertaken through the paper is the following. Firstly, interoperability frameworks are used to select those standards that are to enable interoperability between egovernment systems belonging to different departments in one or more public administrations. Each country defines the requirements on the standards through their standardisation policy. Therefore, the standardisation policy is expected to influence which standards select and are recommended in an interoperability framework. And secondly, interoperability frameworks usually guide public procurement in the area of egovernment systems and service deployment. Specifically, the standards that are recommended or mandated by an interoperability framework are usually referred to in contract documents when governments procure themselves with ICT systems. Since public procurement regulations regulate how technical specifications are set out in contract documentation, it is expected that the support of interoperability frameworks to the procurement procedures would be aligned to the regulations. Based on the above rationale, the paper analyses the cases of three public administrations that have been very active in egovernment deployment. The three cases are the federal government of the United States (US), the European Union (EU) institutions and the UK government. For each case, both the standardisation policy and system, and the public procurement policy and practice are described. From this description, some factors that may influence the interoperability frameworks are identified. Finally, the identified factors are compared against the current practices in the use of the interoperability frameworks. The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, the research methodology is described. In Section 3, the standardisation and public procurement policies that both the US and the EU have developed are described and compared1 and the influence that these policies may have on egovernment deployment is explained. In Section 4, the use of interoperability frameworks by the US federal government, the EU institutions and the UK government is described. In Section 5, the expected influence of the standardisation and public procurement policies is checked against the actual practices in egovernment deployment in both scenarios, the US and the EU. Finally, conclusions are drawn. The paper is focused on the influence on egovernment deployment. Nevertheless, the conclusions can be applied to the specific context of telecommunications systems and services deployment. This statement is based on two reasons. Firstly, interoperability frameworks encompass issues, among others, at the network and interconnection level, where telecommunications lie. And secondly, public administration telecommunications are currently managed by many governments as an asset within the egovernment strategy.

The paper has conducted a study of the standardisation and public procurement policies in the United States and the European Union, with the aim of finding whether and how they influence the deployment of egovernment in the US and the EU, with a focus on the problem of interoperability. These are the main results of the paper: • In the US, the standardisation and public procurement regulations are coherently applied in egovernment deployment, whereby voluntary consensus standards are prioritised against government-unique standards, although any other sort of industry standards may be chosen. • In the EU, there is a non-coherent implementation of the standardisation and public procurement regulations in egovernment deployment. While the EU-wide regulations exhibit preference to the European standards over any other sort of standard, some governments often implement practices in egovernment deployment that are not aligned to those regulations, and in some cases those practices are opposed to them. Given these results, there is a risk that both the US and the EU fail to fulfil the interoperability envisioned by their respective egoverment strategies. Egovernment deployment would end up in systems that fail to provide interoperable services because they do not adhere to either voluntary consensus standards in the US or European standards in the EU.