Statement: Organisations are loosely coupled with other organisations.
Rationale:
Loosely coupled organisations are able to function with minimal dependency on other organisations. This enables faster implementation and change of digital public services.
Any public organisation should avoid the entanglement of inter-organisational processes for performing activities, that spread over multiple organisations. The application for a visa, for instance, should be performed in a single transaction, from an applicant's perspective. Whether the process comprises multiple interactions between public institutions (like Frontex, Embassy, Interpol) or not, should be transparent to the applicant. Inter-organisational interfaces in this case should not duplicate the processes, using the same data and leading to the same outcome. Each organisation serves a unique part of the application process.
Implications:
Loosely coupled integration can be achieved by establishing the proper organisational agreements, that ensure the proper implementation of digital public services without hampering any change or modification in those services.
At technical and semantic layers, it can be achieved by reusing existing application services or core vocabularies that ensure interoperability between services without including dependencies between them.
Principle Source: Organizations Social Systems Conducting Experiments
Principle Source URL: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-14316-8
Scope: Business Agnostic
Category: Digital Public Service Design
Interoperability Layer: Organisational IoP, Semantic IoP, Technical IoP
PURI: http://data.europa.eu/2sa/elap/loosely-coupled-integration