Context
The Commission communication on Enhancing the European Administrative Space aims to support public administrations become more resilient, innovative, and skilled. The ComPAct’s digital pillar provides a strategic set of actions to strengthen Member States administrations’ capacity to effectively implement EU legislation in the digital realm and deliver on the targets related to the digitalisation of public services set out in the Digital Decade policy programme. In addition, the digital pillar works on making public administrations benefit from integrating artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in a safe and trustworthy way. This proposal for a flagship initiative is designed to support Member States’ public administration lay the necessary groundwork for the use of AI technologies to provide high quality and inclusive service to citizens.
To leverage AI technologies effectively, public administrations must invest in foundational elements to make their digital transformation more effective such as: implementing a digital-ready policy-making mindset, re-designing business processes, information systems, and services, enhancing interoperability and data governance and accessibility, and ensuring higher levels of cybersecurity and privacy. These are key to create the technological and organisational foundations to make public administrations truly data-driven, further improve their internal operations, create smarter policies, and better targeted user-friendly services. This will facilitate the integration of AI technologies and make data accessible to them by enabling data sharing across departments, databases, and borders. In addition, these changes can enable whole-of-government approaches whereby diverse ministries, public administrations, and public agencies work together to collaboratively operate and enhance their operational effectiveness and service delivery via the integration of AI technologies.
Objectives
To support Member States’ public administrations build their capacity for Europe’s Digital Decade by strengthening their interoperability (in line with the Interoperable Europe Act) and make them ready to safely and trustworthily integrate AI technologies into their operations. The outcomes of this flagship will contribute to building trust and enhancing competitiveness, via better processes and services that enhance public administration capacity, efficiency and reduce administrative burden.
Direction for requests under the flagship
Member State administrations can design requests that include the following, considering their current level of digitalisation and capacity for data exchange through interoperable and automated databases:
- Working towards implementing EU legislation and principles in the digital realm, including the Single Digital Gateway, the Interoperable Europe Act, and the “once-only” principle across EU Public Administrations to enhance interoperability. The support may also include support for implementing the Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act, or the Data Governance Act.
- Supporting the design of a whole-of-government approach whereby different parts of government collaborate to provide public services.
- Capacity building and process streamlining at all levels of government to prepare and carry out Interoperability Assessments.
- Fostering cross-border public services in collaboration with other Member States and, if applicable, the private sector.
- Establishing experimentation spaces for regulatory learning —such as regulatory sandboxes—to promote interoperability and innovative solutions tested in a controlled environment for regulatory experimentation.
- Designing specific use cases that integrate AI or other emerging technologies to improve the quality and the effectiveness of their services.
