We often talk about cross-border interoperability as a goal to design for. The experience of administrations that have achieved it suggests something different. Cross-border interoperability is an effect. Its primary cause is even digital maturity across the participating countries.
When two administrations are at similar levels of digitalisation, connecting their services is a manageable engineering task. When one is far ahead of the other, no amount of standardisation closes the gap on its own.
Digitalisation is contagious
Digitalisation spreads between countries in the same region. A solution that succeeds in one administration becomes evidence for its neighbours, and that evidence can be more persuasive than any recommendation.
This suggests a practical strategy: find your twin country, and accelerate by importing digitalisation experiences that have already worked there.
Transplants need compatibility
A useful way to think about this is transplantation. Like an organ transplant, success depends on compatibility between donor and recipient. Before importing a solution, assess:
- political will
- budgetary commitment
- legal framework
- strategic outlook
- technology readiness
When a solution succeeds in the donor country, that success should be enough to motivate the receiving country to create the conditions for repeating it.
Trust comes first
One message came through clearly from the administrations I have worked with on this topic: trust is what creates traction. Countries that share a strategic outlook and trust each other collaborate early, before every technical question is settled, and that early collaboration is what moves cross-border services from pilot to production.
This kind of accelerated digitalisation is already happening between European administrations.
Alongside “which standard should we adopt?”, every administration can ask a second question: “whose success can we import, and are we ready to receive it?”