Lithuanian egovernment interoperability model

Interoperability issues are widely discussed not only within business community, but more constantly between public administration representatives. An eGovernment Interoperability Framework (eGIF) is one way to achieve eGovernment interoperability. An eGIF is a set of standards and guidelines that a government uses to specify the preferred way that its agencies, citizens and partners interact with each other. eGIF includes '... the basic technical specifications that all agencies relevant to the eGovernment strategy implementation should adopt'. eGovernment Interoperability Frameworks appear as the governmental policy cornerstones for deploying joined-up information systems and providing one-stop services to citizens and businesses. Lack of interoperability is due to a number of factors. It may be due to policy reasons. Privacy, particularly as it relates to personal health information and national security, are good examples. Lack of interoperability also has to do with the heterogeneous nature of government information systems - the result of past decisions regarding hardware, software, and legacy systems. There is also the 'turf' issue - various agencies want their own systems and are worried about sharing data and/or common services. Lastly, the network effect of some companies that use proprietary standards have helped create some of the current problems. Many governments did not know they had a choice, nor were they aware of the long-term effects of their procurements. Thus, to achieve interoperability, there needs to be a desire for transformation and the cooperation of the various agencies of government. Unless commitment to achieving interoperability is demonstrated at the highest levels, a plethora of policies, as well as bureaucratic and narrowly construed corporate interests can always be used to challenge efforts to make interoperability happen. In order to come up to the expectations of their stakeholders and to achieve real resolution of the evolving interoperability problems, the scope of the eGIFs needs to be extended, including service composition and discovery, development and management of semantic schemas for governmental documents, certification mechanisms and authentication standards. Moreover, a shift from a paper-based specification towards a repository of services, data schemas and process models is needed, in order to serve the ever-changing nature of governments under transformation. Upon conducting a state of the art analysis o