Interoperability Beyond Interoperation

Abstract

So far, we assumed that for setting up a new or improved electronic public service, actors from different government units would select or develop interoperable components of these particular services. We have called these cases “specific-service cases”. For these cases we could identify certain patterns in political and IT governance summarized in the previous chapter. But in our sample we also found infrastructure and portal cases. In these cases, actors wanted to create interoperability beyond an individual service. They wanted to develop a system that would provide several services or be used for several different services without necessarily knowing at the time of development what all those services would be at a future point in time.