Digital Commission Awards: Once-Only wins for ‘Team demonstrating the most multidisciplinary approach for digital-ready policymaking’
19 March 2025 | 4 minutes read
On 18 March 2025, the team behind the Once-Only Technical System won the first ever Digital Commission Special Award for the ‘team demonstrating the most multidisciplinary approach for digital-ready policymaking.’
Organised by the Commission’s Directorate-General for Digital Services (DIGIT), the awards recognise and celebrate outstanding digital projects and initiatives within the Commission to inspire innovation, foster collaboration and drive excellence across the organisation.
Mark Beamish, deputy Head of Unit for Digital Transformation of Industry in the Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs (pictured: left) and Joao Rodrigues Frade, head of sector for building blocks in the Directorate-General for Digital Services (DIGIT) (pictured: right) accepted the award on behalf of the team.
Watch this short video that supported Once-Only’s application during these awards
Digital ready policy making
Digital-ready policymaking is the process of creating policies or laws that take digital aspects into account from the beginning of the policy cycle, to ensure that they are ready for the digital age, future-proof and interoperable. Multidisciplinary teamwork is a key enabler for digital-ready policymaking. It means bringing together policy teams, business analysts, IT and data experts early in the policy design to bridge the policy-IT divide.
The Commission and the Member States implement the Once-Only Technical System through a multidisciplinary approach that brings together a wide range of professionals, from legal to technical, communications to development. Their work includes setting up, testing and rolling out a technical system that works and is secure. Moreover, it requires reaching out to competent authorities, understanding their needs and providing support to onboard to the Once-Only Technical System. Thorough consideration of the legal implications of such a system, notably in respect to digital identity and the protection of personal data rights is also of great importance. Finally, it requires the engagement of political leadership, both at European and national level to make it a success.
Simplifying cross-border administration
Today, EU citizens and businesses still face numerous obstacles when conducting cross-border administrative procedures when moving abroad. They may not know which documents they need to submit for completing a procedure, who the responsible authorities are, or whether a document from their home country is equivalent to a document in another Member State.
The Commission has made the simplification of administrative procedures a priority, both in its 2025 work programme(opens in a new tab) and its Competitiveness Compass(opens in a new tab). Once-Only is a key contributor to this objective: It connects competent authorities across the EU and maps the documents and data they require for their cross-border procedures.
For citizens and businesses, this means that they can simply consent to the automatic exchange of data between authorities, without having to match, identify, fetch and submit this data themselves. Thanks to Once-Only, they no longer need to look for their data – instead, their data comes to them.
To learn more about the benefits of the Once-Only Technical System for citizens and businesses, bookmark the Once-Only hub (opens in a new tab) and subscribe(opens in a new tab) to our newsletter.