To many, X-Road® is a synonym of interoperability. National governments, ministries and public agencies have looked at the platform as a viable option to solve their data exchange problems between institutions. However, some might regard security as the main benefit of the technology.
Of course, the two things go hand in hand, and that's what gives the X-Road technology its unique appeal. But while interoperability itself wasn't all that new in the Argentinian province of Neuquén, security in data exchange is what the public sector was after.
Gustavo Giorgetti, engineer and serial innovator with his firm ThinkNet, is the person in charge of interoperability projects in the province. With him and his son Lucas, we delved deeper into what drives the interest in X-Road on that side of the world. Because if first was the Province of Neuquén, a nationwide project might soon follow.
Background and institutional framework
Not many stories begin with "It all started on a trip to Estonia" – but this is one of those. As a concept, interoperability had already been lingering among governance experts and engineers in the Argentinian province of Neuquén. In practice, it was a long time coming.
Decisive, to that end, was a trip to Estonia organized by the World Bank which engineer Gustavo Giorgetti participated in. "I had been thinking about interoperability as a way to connect different, siloed government organizations back home in Argentina, but that study trip to Estonia in 2007 was the chance to see it put to work. That experience, the Estonian real-life example, gave us the possibility to set it as a viable goal in Neuquén," Giorgetti says.
The e-government journey of the Province of Neuquén started around that time, in 2008. "Strong political will was necessary, back then, to make the project move its first steps. This support came from engineer Rodolfo Esteban Lafitte, at the time Secretary of Public Service, with a directive that kicked off the roll-out of the first components in our 'Integrabilidad' environment," Giorgetti explains.
Let's focus for a moment on the name. The term indicates a mix between interoperability and integration of digital services in it, setting the two as core prerequisites for a functional ecosystem to exchange information between public agencies. From the Estonian example, the platform in Neuquén borrowed the distributed characteristics of the model and the once-only approach, formalized in a dedicated law on de-bureaucratization in 2012 (Ley N°2819, here in Spanish).
"Mirroring what had been done in Estonia, and drawing inspiration from that experience, we created our interoperability ecosystem. Named 'Integrabilidad', it has been active in Neuquén since 2010," Giorgetti proudly says. But the release of X-Road as an open-source technology under MIT license in 2015-2016 has offered the Province of Neuquén an opportunity to further improve the previously created ecosystem.
Needs and challenges
However, as in all processes on innovation, technology is not the only element that makes them a success. It is also a matter of culture, readiness to adopt new solutions, and working methods. These subjects have posed some challenges along the way, pushing for a reorganization of the processes moving the gears of the public administration in Neuquén.
"For what concerns the cultural aspect, Estonia had quite an advantage in that sense – the fact that pretty much there was little legacy on that. In our case, the cultural change within the public administration triggered by that initial political will, and the methodologies elaborated, were crucial to making Integrabilidad work," Giorgetti warns. "Some might think that it's just a matter of technology, but interoperability implies a reshaping of the processes and the waysto deliver public services," he continues.
Ultimately, the need was to adapt the implementation of the model in mind to a tendency to work on a case-by-case basis. "Change, technological and cultural, finds more favourable ground to take place in situations of emergency. By treating such situations or sudden issues with solutions that would take us closer to the goal we had set, it was possible to gradually deploy the distributed ecosystem we wanted to achieve," Giorgetti explains.
The solution
With the release of the source code of X-Road in 2015-2016, the public administration of Neuquén saw the chance to bring to Integrabilidad a missing feature – security. Because, according to Giorgetti, "the perfect tool for interoperability answers both technological and legal necessities. X-Road is cryptography on the internet, security on the internet."
This is where the primary business value lied for Neuquén to migrate to X-Road from its originally implemented clone. The main difference between the two platforms is cryptography, security, and the legal framework that X-Road guarantees through time-stamping and the digital signature of messages.
In 2017, Neuquén started to replace its interoperability platform with X-Road – first with the help of Riho Oks. Today, ‘Integrabilidad con X-Road’ is the platform for secure data exchange that connects up to 29 information systems and back offices of service providers in the public sector of Neuquén. The Banco Provincia del Neuquén (bank) then joined in 2019, and private healthcare providers followed in 2020 amid the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"The security layer offered by X-Road has been a strong argument in facilitating the spread of the platform among both public and private actors," Giorgetti says. The public can check here key statistics and resources on the functioning of the platform.
But the plan is now to take ‘Integrabilidad con X-Road’ to a higher level of governance, beyond the borders of the province. It is underway a project for the integrabilidad of data and services, under the management of the Federal Council of the Public Service and the National Secretariat of Public Innovation, aiming to address two key objectives:
1. Surveying the interoperability and digitalization capabilities of all provinces to enhance cooperation and innovation within and among them;
2. Building a model of reference on integrabilidad, to deploy a digital ecosystem across provinces based on the principles of that in Neuquén.
Work is progressing, but it seems that ‘Integrabilidad con X-Road’ has already achieved a significant milestone – setting an example in Argentina for the way processes, data, and services are organized in a local public administration. Can it set the record also as a major bottom-up model for the nationwide exercise of interoperability? In Europe, too, if successful, there could be lessons to learn from Latin America.