Presented at DIGITEC tech talks by: Claudio Montanari (European Parliament) and Carlos Torrecilla (European Commission)
\nSummarized by: Cristian Talesco
\nLet´s explain it with an example. In 2011, the European Union (EU) regulated and approved a legislative act that forbade the use of cadmium in new technology sold within the EU. Hence, companies, to sell screens in the EU, had to comply with the new regulation, but as their technology was not ready for such a sudden change, an exemption period was necessary. Therefore, the European Commission has been empowered by the EU co-legislators (the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union) to identify a new deadline for the exemption date. This was done through a delegated act, which is a legally binding decision that regulates important aspects for the general public (ex. customs code). In short, delegated acts are instruments used by the Commission to guarantee the application of EU law.
\nManufactures and stakeholders have to comply with delegated acts; thus they have interest to follow the EU decision making process. They have already access to information but it is scattered and therefore difficult to find. In addition, the process is inter-institutional, so there are several information systems involved from the three institutions. All three institutions take decisions for the legislation in question, which make the legislative process complicated.
\nThis project aimed at creating an Inter-institutional Register of Delegated Acts, which has been planned following the inter-institutional agreement on better law-making signed by the three major European Institutions (the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the Council of the European Union). Both events pointed at increasing transparency and efficiency in the preparation, adoption and scrutiny of delegated acts.
\nThe system had to comply with specific characteristics. It had to be well-structured, user friendly, able to enhance transparency, ease planning and enable traceability. The project had initial major challenges to face: work with very short deadlines and with three Institutions and there was a lack of previous similar experiences with stakeholders in inter-institutional projects. Nevertheless, challenges were overcome by leveraging on the project opportunities: there has been a strong mandate and political commitment, spirit of collaboration amongst all stakeholders and a pragmatic approach from business and IT sides.
\nThe project was launched, and it was the result of a legal agreement of the three institutions. It should be fully in place by December 2017.
\nPlanning required collaboration, good will and political support. The main steps followed to set-up the project were:
\nThe first step was to put governance in place. The steering committee consisted of representatives from the three institutions. Each representative looked at the needs of each institution. Then, the group identified the process and the architecture. Time was short, and a pragmatic view was maintained. A single responsibility principle guided the system towards a single task. As seen, information was already available but it was scattered on many websites, therefore it was missing an aggregation layer. The RegDel system then became the aggregator, with no need for data/documents input. The system acted as a pointer to the different information sources. Next step was the distribution of information by a channel based on subscription.
\nApproaching an integration project had some challenges. However, there was no major change made in the source systems, as the project relied mainly on public data, and teams worked in parallel in order to meet deadline based on the definition of well-structured APIs. Overall, an agile project approach was applied; interaction between parties was constant to face issues immediately when they emerged. There was a careful attention in the user experience design, to make it user friendly.
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