Georgios Lampropoulos is Head of Software Department of the Hellenic Organisation of Welfare Benefits and Social Solidarity (OPEKA), Greece, in which he and his team are responsible for applications on social benefits and interoperability with other public organisations.
He holds B.Sc, M.Sc and Ph.D degrees in Informatics and Telecommunications and before joining OPEKA he had participated in numerous EU R&D Projects and Initiatives mainly focusing on ‘Interworking architectures in next generation networks’.
Dr. Lampropoulos believes that interoperability is a key feature for promoting useful applications both at national and European level. He also feels that enabling interoperability and solving basic technical, semantic, organisational and legal issues will significantly improve the end user experience.
In this interview, he speaks about OPEKA’s experience with the IMAPS questionnaire and the Interoperability Maturity Tools (IMTs).
Q: Which digital public service has been selected for the IMAPS questionnaire?
Georgios Lampropoulos: The digital public service that the Organisation of Welfare Benefits and Social Solidarity (OPEKA) selected for the IMAPS questionnaire is the ‘Social solidarity allowance of uninsured seniors’.
Q: How did you learn about IMAPS questionnaire?
Georgios Lampropoulos: The Organisation first heard about the IMAPS questionnaire from the e-government portal (https://www.e-gif.gov.gr/), as one of the available solutions on interoperability.
Q: Why did you use IMAPS questionnaire?
Georgios Lampropoulos: The objective was to assess and understand the level of interoperability maturity for this service in line with the European Interoperability Framework (EIF). A topic of particular interest was the current state of the service’s legal interoperability aspects, as well as the exploration of possible areas for improvement. Additionally, another driving factor was to make a comparison between the service’s interoperability features and the guidelines provided from the Hellenic National Center of Interoperability.
Q: What value did IMAPS questionnaire bring to your organisation?
Georgios Lampropoulos: IMAPS provided us with useful insights at both the theoretical and practical level. After performing the IMAPS questionnaire and receiving tailored recommendations, we were able to identify indicative interoperability gaps and practical areas for improvement that are cost-effective and may be integrated in our wider planning for service upgrades.
Q: What challenges did you encounter during the IMAPS questionnaire?
Georgios Lampropoulos: Performing the IMAPS questionnaire raised some challenges for our team that are described below.
First, the IMAPS questionnaire is not available in Greek, the primary language used by the team’s members, and sometimes this added a challenge in terms of understanding the questions and the terminology used.
In addition, we found that the actual time of completion for the IMAPS questionnaire was longer since part of the requested information in the survey was not immediately available and had to be collected from people with specialised knowledge on the subjects.
Q: Would you recommend IMAPS to other organisations?
Georgios Lampropoulos: We can confidently say that participating in the Interoperability Maturity Tools (IMTs) knowledge transfer was indeed the correct decision as we got valuable insights for the use of IMAPS questionnaire and recommendations.
Based on our user journey with IMAPS questionnaire, we strongly believe that IMAPS may also be considered by other public administrations in Greece and beyond (indicatively, the Independent Authority for Public Revenue - AADE, the e-Government Center for Social Security - IDIKA, the National Social Security Entity - eEFKA, etc.).
We would therefore recommend IMAPS questionnaire to any public administration official who is looking to measure and ultimately improve the interoperability maturity of their service.
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Would you like to discover the Interoperability Maturity Tools in more detail? Visit IMTs in the Joinup page or contact us via e-mail DIGIT-IMAPS@ec.europa.eu.