e-SENS and Connecting Europe Facility: how do they work together?
e-SENS and CEF both aim at developing the European digital single market and reaching economic growth by making available re-usable and interoperable solutions. Their goal is to facilitate the access for citizens and businesses to online services across borders. Working in close cooperation, e-SENS and CEF have complementary roles in achieving this goal.
e-SENS is piloting the use of general-purpose building blocks such as e-Documents, e-Delivery, e-ID, e-Signature and Semantics in four distinct sectors: e-Justice, e-Health, e-Procurement and Business Lifecycle. More pilots are expected to be launched within e-SENS as new sectors show interest in the use of general purpose building blocks instead of developing their own.
The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) is a new financing instrument of trans-European networks 2014-2020 in the fields of transport (€26.25 billion), energy (€5.85 billion) and telecommunications (€1.14 billion). In the context of CEF Telecommunications, funding is allocated to broadband networks and Digital Service Infrastructures (DSIs).
As part of the DSIs, CEF puts forward a set of production-ready building blocks that provide 'out of the box' tools and services. They were mainly developed in Large Scale Pilots* and were, or still are, being consolidated and improved by e-SENS. The selected DSIs building blocks, included in the 2014 work programme, are e-Delivery, e-ID, e-Signature and e-Invoicing, which are also building blocks of e-SENS. Cooperation is ongoing between the teams of e-SENS and CEF where the expected practical result is, in most cases, the piloting of the CEF building blocks in new sectors under the coordination of e-SENS. The results of these pilots and new interoperability agreements will then be fed into CEF through well-defined governance processes.
CEF and e-SENS are both working on facilitating the delivery of cross-border online services. While CEF provides building blocks to e-SENS for piloting, interoperability agreements and improvements agreed within e-SENS will be fed into CEF.
* Large Scale Pilots (LSPs) are especially e-CODEX, epSOS, PEPPOL, SPOCS and STORK