The IMAPS team has released a suite of IMAPS specialisations which allow public service owners to get insights on the legal, organisational, technical and semantic interoperability maturity of their digital public service.
What approach was taken?
The IMAPS specialisations are developed on similar basis as the conceptual model of IMAPS, i.e. the Interoperability Maturity Assessment of a Public Service.
To recall, IMAPS is a self-assessment tool that helps public service owners evaluate, consider and improve all key interoperability aspects of their digital public service from the behavioural interoperability dimension.
Moreover, designed in light of the new European Interoperability Framework (EIF), the new IMAPS specialisations allow public service owners to confirm the EIF conformance of their digital public service.
What are the commonalities with IMAPS?
- Any digital public service can be assessed – from open data portals, and e-voting platforms, to public procurement services;
- Applicable to digital public services at all levels of government (international, European, national, regional and local);
- A user friendly online questionnaire for completing the assessment (available via EUSurvey);
- An interoperability maturity score considering five levels from ad hoc to seamless interoperability;
- A set of recommendations for improving the behavioural interoperability of the digital public service in terms of the legal, semantic, technical and organisational viewpoint.
What is new?
- Starting from IMAPS’ global view of the interoperability maturity, IMAPS specialisations provide insights on specific interoperability viewpoints of the digital public service, i.e. the legal, organisational, technical and semantic interoperability viewpoints.
- While IMAPS examines three service areas, i.e. service delivery, service management and service consumption, the IMAPS specialisations focus on service delivery and service consumption.
- Both IMAPS and its specialisations assess the various areas of a digital public service in terms of behavioural interoperability specifications, capabilities and manifestations.
Why is it relevant for you?
Are you involved in the design, development, management or delivery of a digital public service? IMAPS gives you the opportunity to assess the behavioural interoperability maturity level of a digital public service, providing the following benefits:
- Measures how well a digital public service is able to interact with its end users (administrations - businesses - citizens) or other client services to realise mutually beneficial and agreed common goals through the exchange of information and reuse of services;
- Provides an opportunity to know and improve the behavioural interoperability of a public service, at any point in time, throughout the lifecycle of a public service;
- Provides on-demand peer comparisons with other public services’ behavioural interoperability maturity.
What is next?
The IMAPS team is currently working on a new release of the IMAPS survey, to ensure alignment with the newly developed specialisations. The provisional release date is beginning of July 2020.
Explore the new IMAPS specialisations!
Visit the LIMAPS, OIMAPS, TIMAPS and SIMAPS solutions on Joinup and start your assessment.
Please note that the new specialisations are available as beta versions.
L-O-S-T in translation? Terminology recap
| Interoperability dimension | Description |
|
Legal Interoperability LIMAPS |
Focuses on the legal provisions that regulate the collaboration among different public administrations that operate under different legal mandates, as well as on limitations of data, information, knowledge share and reuse, and also, to legal interoperability enablers and manifestations that resolve legal incompatibilities and facilitate the interaction of the digital public services with its end users and other client services. |
|
Organisational Interoperability OIMAPS |
Focuses on business processes and the collaboration among public administrations of different internal structures and user community requirements, that wish to exchange data, information and knowledge. This aspect of interoperability is concerned with how different organisations such as different Member State Administrations collaborate in order to achieve their mutually beneficial and agreed e-Government service-related goals. In scope for organisational interoperability are also the operational ways of service delivery and consumption (channels, one-stop shop services, user-focus, etc.), as well as the respective level of automation (automatically vs. manually). |
|
Semantic Interoperability SIMAPS |
Enables organisations to process information from external sources in a meaningful manner and ensures that the precise meaning of exchanged information is understood and preserved throughout exchanges between different Public Administrations. In the context of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), semantic interoperability also encompasses the syntactic interoperability in the sense of describing the exact format of the information to be exchanged in terms of grammar, format and schemas. Semantic interoperability provides also a common understanding of the data, by using common nomenclatures and data formats. It is crucial to agree on the use of common semantic standards, promote transparent and well-documented metadata policies and increase the visibility and reuse of existing semantic interoperability solutions. |
|
Technical Interoperability TIMAPS |
Focuses on the technical aspects of linking information systems and services. It includes aspects such as interface specifications, interconnection services, data integration services, data presentation and exchange, syntactic definitions, etc. Technical Interoperability is usually associated with hardware/software components, systems and platforms that enable machine-to-machine communication to take place. The interoperability of information systems is essential in providing integrated government services. |