General Information

Cases/Enablers
OOP Enabling Infrastructure
Appetizer
The project has enabled efficient interoperable electronic data collecting from 50+ data sources within public sector and wider (from the banks also) - for the specific purposes of the e-Social Security.
OOP aspect
The system enables decisions on social rights, benefits, subsidies and payments (Exercise of Rights to Public Funds Act ERPFA or ZUPJS, Articles 5-6): child benefits, cash social assistance, income support, state scholarships, reduced kindergarten fee, snack subsidy for elementary and high school students, lunch subsidy for elementary school students, transport subsidy for high school students and students, exemption of payment of social security services, contribution to the payment of a family assistant, rent subsidy, right to covering the difference to full value of health care services, right to the payment of contribution for compulsory health insurance.
Enquiries for 10.000 - 20.000 persons, automatically processed every day, with 50+ data sources (0,5% -1% of total population).
Enabling fair decisions (more efficient distribution of social support budget)
Reduced costs for data gathering (IT enabled enquiries are vastly cheaper than the Classic paper enquiries)
Broad possibilities for reuse of existing building blocks in other systems, either as the existing solution or as a concept (more re-use, higher savings with development and operations costs).
Short summary
The project has enabled efficient interoperable electronic data collecting from 50+ data sources within public sector and wider (from the banks also) - for the specific purposes of the e-Social Security. The decisions on social support and other social benefits are performed based on the income and property of the applicants and their family members. These data on the income and property are being collected electronically, with a great respect to the personal data protection. The costs for such an extensive data gathering would be enormous if that process would be carried out in the classical way (paper questions, paper answers, scanning, postal costs...) but the operating costs for the new IT-supported and automated data gathering were now lowered to the marginal minimum. The reusable components that support these data gathering processes (Tray, IO-module, Asynchronous module and Security platform) and were primarily developed for e-Social Security will also be used in other similar projects where data is requested from numerous diverse and scattered data sources.
A set of smart and flexible building blocks for data exchange was developed primarily for e-social security in 2012 but today they are used in many other information systems (eg. e-public procurement, e-government portal...).
The main building blocks are TRAY (system for standardized and controlled execution of data enquiries), IO-MODULE (standardized platform for data distribution) and ASYNCHRONOUS MODULE (enabling data enquiries to data sources where synchronous access is not possible).
The building blocks are operated by the Ministry of Public Administration in Slovenia, as central solutions. Institutions with data exchange needs can integrate to the building blocks and use their functionalities, under the terms and conditions published on National Interoperability Portal.
Institutions can use building blocks to implement the once-only principle, to lower their investment and operating costs, to shorten development time, and to improve the standardization and reliability.
Focus
Government
Start date
Scope
National/Federal
Country
Slovenia
Nature and status of project
Rolled Out
Is the OOP case/enabler mandatory?
Opt-in

ENABLING ASSETS OR COMPONENTS

Technical interoperability
The project team developed a set of reusable building blocks for electronic data gathering, now forming an important part of central interoperability infrastructure of Slovenia:
- Tray (intelligent system for standardized execution of data enquiries, operating as a reliable and extremely flexible transport channel, neutralizing the technological specifics and complexity of data sources, based on the modern state-of-the-art open-source Java SOA technology)
- IO-Module (standardized platform for data distribution, enabling institutions to be able offer heavy-duty synchronous access to distribution copy of data, preserving a reliable electronic trail and all the required control mechanisms to the data owner)
- Asynchronous Module (an application component enabling asynchronous electronic data enquiries to those data sources where the synchronous access is not possible due to security, technical or other reasons)
-Security Platform (standardized system for managing users and their rights in applications, supporting all the qualified digital certificates in Slovenia).

DATA HANDLING / DATA EXCHANGE

Type of data sharing
Actual data
Data handler
Stakeholder name
Public institutions
Stakeholder category
Government
Stakeholder name
Private companies (eg. banks)
Stakeholder category
Business
Further stakeholders
The Ministry of social affairs is the owner of the business processes regarding the decisions on social support.
Ministry of social affairs was/is responsible for the aspects of data processing and interpretation and for legal aspect; Ministry for public administration is/was responsible for programme coordination and for developing powerful reusable building blocks which can be reused in other systems.
Barriers and success factors
On 27 June 2013, the Ministry of the Interior and Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia received the UNPSA 2013 Award as the winner in the category “Promoting Whole-of-the-Government Approaches in the Information Age” in the region of Europe and North America, for the project "Reusable IT building blocks for electronic data exchange - implementation for e-Social Security".
Lessons learned
1. For such cross-cutting project, practically covering whole of the government scope, and being very sensitive in the nature, you need a strong and stable political support.
2. With so many stakeholders, you can't and shouldn't make extensive plans in advance, because there are many important facts that you can't know and incorporate in the initial planning. You have to prepare to be agile and flexible, with the project management team and with the development teams.
3. In such a project, you will spend much of time and energy for risk management, for handling the planned and new risks that materialize very frequently.
4. In such systems where personal data are processed and used for very delicate decisions, it is very useful to actively include the Information Commissioner or similar Data Protection authority so to be sufficiently data-protection and security compliant "by design".