The European Interoperability Framework (EIF) is a set of recommendations which specify how administrations, businesses and citizens communicate with each other within the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been de ...

and across

Member State A member state is a state that is a member of an international organization or of a federation or confederation. Since the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) include some members that are not sovereign state ...

borders. The EIF 1.0 was issued under the Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens programme (IDABC). The EIF continues under the new ISA programme, which replaced the IDABC programme on 31 December 2009. EIF in effect is an

Enterprise architecture framework An enterprise architecture framework (EA framework) defines how to create and use an enterprise architecture. An architecture framework provides principles and practices for creating and using the architecture description of a system. It struct ...

targeted at the largest possible scale, designed to promote integration spanning multiple sovereign

Nation States A nation state is a political unit where the state and nation are congruent. It is a more precise concept than "country", since a country does not need to have a predominant ethnic group. A nation, in the sense of a common ethnicity, may i ...

, specifically EU Member States. For further examples of Enterprise Architecture frameworks designed operate at different levels of scale, see also Alternative Enterprise Architecture Frameworks

Versions

EIF Version 1.0

EIF Version 1.0 was published in November 2004. Further non-technology obstacles that stand in the way of greater EIF adoption include the facts that EU Member States currently differ widely in terms of: * Scope of government - services provided, degree of state ownership of businesses, scale of armed forces, police and border control operations * Structure of government - central/local government balance, what departments exist, how departments interact * Citizen/state interaction models - processes related to key life events (births, marriages, deaths), document issue procedures, support for foreign languages

EIF Version 2

Draft Version 2 of the EIF was the subject of a political debate, where the main technology/commercial issues relate to the role of lobbying for proprietary software. EIF 2 was adopted by the European Commission as the ''Annex II - EIF (European Interoperability Framework)'' of the ''Communication “Towards interoperability for European public services”'' on 16 December 2010.

'New EIF'

On 23 March 2017, the ISA2 programme released a new version of EIF. This version dropped version numbers and is simply called 'new EIF' and should include policy changes of the past years.{{cite web, url=https://ec.europa.eu/isa2/eif_en, title=New European Interoperability Framework at the website of the European Commission, ISA2 programme, date=16 February 2017, access-date=14 April 2017

References

External links