eDelivery Documentation

What are the goals and benefits of eDelivery?

The implementation of eDelivery may be triggered by a new EU regulation, a new Large Scale Pilot sponsored through EU funding (H2020 or other) or a new cooperation initiative between EU Member States.

Even if eDelivery is conceived for the exchange of documents and data across borders, it is also possible to use it to link up different regions, municipalities, etc. in one Member State.

Goals of eDelivery

A success factor for implementing eDelivery is to clearly understand the motivation for its use, its scope and (business) needs. There are 4 main goals behind an eDelivery implementation: interoperability, scalability and performance, security and legal assurance & accountability.

Interoperability 

Implementing common technical specifications that enable diverse organisations to exchange data and documents.

Example  It is difficult to enable the exchange of data between Member States because their information systems were developed independently and have, as a result, no common data structures (not addressed by eDelivery) and data exchange protocol (addressed by eDelivery).

The business needs that can be satisfied by interoperability are:

1. You can exchange documents and/ or data using a standardised messaging protocols other than e-mail
2. You can exchange attachments in addition to messages (XML documents)
3. The information about the participants (what messages they can process, the message protocol that they support, …) is easily discoverable and accessible to you and to everyone else in the data exchange network
4. You can easily change and discover the registered address of nodes
5. You can execute asynchronous request-response interactions

Security 

Promoting an atmosphere of trust among all participants in the message exchange network.

Example  E-mail is widespread and reaches the intended recipients most of the time, but its delivery is not guaranteed. Furthermore, e-mail is usually not encrypted meaning that its contents may be intercepted and compromised along the way. A number of document and data exchange systems, deployed in the late 1990s/ early 2000s, no longer match the modern-day security demands.

1. You are certain that data and documents are secured against any modification (integrity)
2. You are certain that documents are encrypted during transmission (confidentiality)
3. You are certain that the origin and the destination of the data and documents are trustworthy
4. You have access to advanced and configurable logging of events related to the exchange of data and documents

Scalability & Performance

Enabling the number of participants in the data exchange network to grow as well as the number of exchanged messages.

Example  EU systems based on a hub and spoke architecture, where the systems  of the Member States connect to a hub operated by the European Commission, are hard to scale as the hub becomes a bottleneck.Data exchange systems that rely on e-mail  are not easy to automate and consequently not easy to scale.

1. You can exchange documents and data files larger than 50 Mb 
2. Your back-office has different ways to connect to the message exchange network
3. You are certain that the message exchange network will adapt to an increasing number of nodes, as opposed to a stable number of nodes
4. You are certain you can handle increasing messaging loads in a day, hour, etc
5. You are certain you have access to advanced and configurable monitoring of the system

Legal Assurance & Accountability

Promoting a high level of transparency and confidence among all participants in the message exchange network.

Example  The evidences produced during the exchange of data and documents should have a legally recognised evidential value.

1. You have the guarantee that data and documents are delivered once and only once (retries, receipts, duplicate elimination)
2. You are certain that messages are delivered even if sent to temporarily unavailable channels (store and forward)
3. You receive evidences, possibly with legally recognised evidential value, of the several steps of the exchange of documents and data
4. You are certain of the non-repudiation of receipt and/or origin of every exchange through signature
5. You are certain of time synchronization in the message exchange process

Benefits of eDelivery 

Individual Projects and Policy Domains that decide to set-up an eDelivery infrastructure can expect a number of benefits.