DBA D4.7 Initial Running Phase Report
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[Work in progress]
Executive Summary
This document embodies the intermediate report on the DE4A Doing Business Abroad pilot, providing preliminary conclusions and lessons learned from piloting the exchange cross border information exchange in the context of the Single Digital Gateway. It is the first of two reports on this matter, covering preparatory activities towards piloting the use cases for Doing Business Abroad. This includes the deployment of DE4A common components, adaption of Member State infrastructure, testing of integrations between Member States and common infrastructure components and involving companies to participate in the pilot.
The main achievement of the Doing Business Abroad piot was the establishment of an international infrastructure for authenticating and authorizing company-representatives, as well as exchanging the evidence about companies from business registers to service providers in other Member States. This achievement was developed and tested in a systematic approach, resulting in a proven and secure operation that can be used for actual piloting the first cross-border use case: registering a company abroad. The established infrastructure can and will be extended with functionality for the second use case: keeping the company data up to date with the service provider. Designs and architectures for the second use case have been completed and impact assessment on national infrastructures have been done as well, providing a good basis for development towards the second part of the pilot.
These results have been achieved despite many challenges, like the pandemic which limited collaboration between DE4A partners to an on-line fashion. Also many partners involved in DE4A understandably prioritized working on national solutions for - for example - COVID health certificates, providing a continuous challenge resource-allocation for DE4A. These, and other challenges posed risks for DE4A progress and timeline, and even required several partners to terminate their involvement in the programme. Five combinations fo Data Owners and Data Evaluators have fully completed the development and test cycle and are ready to run real pilots. The remaining combinations between other Data Owners and Data Evaluators will be ready later in 2022.
Evaluation of all preparatory activities regarding the implementation of the infrastructure to support SDG-use cases for companies, have led to important (preliminary) conclusions and lessons learned. Arguably the most important conclusion would be that the DE4A components used to facilitate the pilot for the SDG use cases, proved deployable and implementable without any major or unexpected difficulties. Several tests have confirmed that the solution works, and does what it is supposed to do: facilitate the cross-border request and exchange of evidence about companies.
Doing Business Abroad partners all faced different (local) challenges when implementing the international solution. These challenges were both technical and organizational, and lead to different velocities per Member State when implementing the DE4A solutions. Using a general implementation approach where complexity is introduced very gradually seems paramount. By aiming for a very small and simple start and thereafter increasingly complex milestones, partners can organize and focus their implementation-activities, and confirm their results with other Member States before commencing the next plateau in the implementation. The approach also helped with the coordination and communication within Member States, as usually several authorities will be involved when implementing the SDG. Installing a project-team on Member State level, governing project-resources and -activities from different national authorities would be advisable. Before starting actual implementation, this team should take several months to align resources and priorities within the Member State, and perform preliminary assessments on both a technical and organizational level.
Additional conclusions and lessons learned are expected from running pilots for both use cases, having real companies and representatives involved.