BT, Siemens and Visa lead 23-strong e-Government research project consortium

A 23-strong consortium lead by BT, Siemens and Visa has signed a ââ€Å¡Ã‚¬12 million contract with the European Commission to conduct research into the development of a simple, coherent and interoperable electronic identification and authentication architecture to underpin e-government applications in the EU and beyond.

The aim is to increase the adoption of e-government across Europe by providing a framework to prove identities electronically between government administrations, businesses and citizens that is easy for member states to implement, and convenient for citizens to use. The Guide Consortium (Government User IDentity for Europe) groups 23 organisations across 13 countries. It has been established with the shared vision of enabling Europe to become the global leader of e-government services through the creation of an open architecture for identity authentication and appropriate ID management. Supported by government representatives across 12 member states, project GUIDE is multi-disciplinary and will span a range of established technologies. The project will also consider the social, economic, and ethical policy making issues across Europe. It is one of the largest projects to be funded by the European Commission Information Society Directorate-General. The European Councils Conclusions on eGovernment in November 2003 called for projects such as GUIDE that would evaluate necessities, obstacles and solutions… to explore … possible interoperable European solutions for citizens and companies authentication for e-government in the Internal Market, in order to facilitate mobility in Europe and provide cross-border services on line. The Council also called for remaining legal and regulatory barriers to e-government to be identified. GUIDEs multi-faceted approach will address these elements by exploiting existing technology, trusted models and proven commercial frameworks. Many attempts have been made to advance e-government services in Europe and to address the problem of online authentication of the identity of citizens and businesses. A number of solutions have been developed but to date these have had limited success, which has hindered the development and take-up of e-government services. The adoption of e-government services currently faces resistance from administrations, businesses and citizens due to lack of trust in system security and the potential threat of identity theft. These issues have to be addressed if EU member states are to adopt systems that can dramatically improve the efficiency of inter-administration communication and harness the full potential that pan-European integration brings.