Project Context and objectives

FAST stands for Fournisseur d'Accès Sécurisés Transactionnels (Secure Access Gateway Provider). It was developed by French public financial institution Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations (CDC). The project focuses on the FAST secure gateway, which has been under development in France for nearly three years.
FAST provides openness and transparency in information access for communications between citizens and their administrations.
Through FAST, public administrations can streamline their operations by switching their document management systems onto an electronic platform. Documents can be exchanged securely and efficiently in electronic format, between different agencies and different levels of the administration. FAST allows Fully Automated Secure Transactions. It has been successfully demonstrated in a number of contexts in French local and regional administrations

Services to be offered

The FAST system provides:

• Automated, secure document exchange;
• Legally recognised acknowledgement of receipt;
• Electronic certificates and signatures;
• Secure encryption of information;
• Traceability (electronic paper trails), timestamping and archiving.

FAST streamlines back office processes and makes document exchange easier. It thus lightens the load of administration officials. Authorities are required to exchange notifications on the occasion of marriages, deaths and other life events requiring certification, and are also required to exchange data and information with the Ministry of the Interior concerning local authorities’ decisions. All of this documentation is easily exchangeable through FAST.
Furthermore, procedural burdens are reduced for citizens – for example, they will no longer have to ask for a copy of a birth certificate where it is required for a benefit application.
By reducing the time required for dealing with administrative demands and the associated costs, FAST thus makes a contribution to improving government efficiency in Europe. By deploying FAST in different administrations across Europe, citizens throughout the European Union can share in these benefits.

It is possible to transfer FASTeTEN good practices between European countries; the pre-conditions for this are technical interoperability, coupled with examination of the legal and organisational barriers that may exist. FASTeTEN has shown how this can be done, through a programme of workflow analysis that can be applied across different organisations. FASTeTEN has also established a potential deployers' group to monitor the pilot deployments (Uk and Spain). This is a way of giving public authorities that may be interested in the pilot project a no-commitment way of participating, as well as an opportunity to monitor the deployment of the FAST bundle of services in other countries, thus highlighting the type of barriers that must be overcome.

Areas of deployment

The bundle of services, FAST has been successfully developed and piloted in France. FASTeTEN is being demonstrated FAST in different eGovernment contexts in Spain and the United Kingdom.

UK

Services for children within the UK are currently undergoing a massive reorganisation. A new service came out from the join of the Education Department and Children’s Social Services within a Local Authority to form ‘Children and Young Peoples Service’. The UK Government is financing several initiatives within this new service, aiming at:

• Improve attendance at school
• Improve attainment
• Encourage parental/guardian participation
• Target use of resources
• Ensure child safety

One of these initiatives is ‘Building Schools for the Future’. Sheffield City Council (SCC) is one of 4 ‘Pathfinder’ Authorities in this initiative, with a specific remit of leading in ICT. There are to be 7 new schools built in Sheffield, the first one will open in September 2007. It is envisaged that as a Pathfinder Authority, Sheffield will develop a blue print of systems and processes within these new schools that can be used by, and rolled out to, other Authorities within the UK.

A second initiative is ‘Managed Learning Environment’, the Government has given money to each school in the UK to develop an online learning space for each child. SCC is running a pilot that will not only give access to a virtual learning environment and online working space for both teachers and pupils, but will also give parents a portal from which they can access real time information about their children. The Education Authority has a duty of care to give parents information within a specific timeframe.

A third initiative is ‘Safety Net’. This system aims to bring together Health, Education and Social Services. It allows confidentiality and data protection by division of duties and only allowing particular job roles access to specific pertinent information. However, if someone in any of these service areas accesses a child’s record, it raises a ‘flag’. When an individual child’s record has been accessed 3 times by anyone across all the services a warning is issued that this child may be at risk.

SPAIN

The targeted service in the Region of Valencia will be the electronic public procurement system that is being implemented in compliance with the new EU directives. This system follows the guidelines provided by the European Commission under the Interchange of Data between Administrations programme (IDA) “Functional Requirements for conducting electronic public procurement under the EU Framework” (European Communities, 2005).

Following these guidelines, security mechanisms are needed to provide a secure communication interface, mainly for the exchange of documents between procurement authorities and Economic Operators. Standards constituting adequate and acceptable security need to be provided for the implementation of services during each stage of the procurement process. The required specifications need to be provided for ensuring adequate authentication, digital signature, non-repudiation, data integrity and encryption.

The main objectives considered for the creation of a secure environment are the following:

• Authentication: guarantees that the service is only accessible to users with a verified identity.
• Authorisation: guarantees that authenticated users can only access services or data matching their role and access rights.
• Confidentiality: guarantees that the data exchanged between the person requesting it and the provider cannot be intercepted or accessed by a third non-authorised party.
• Integrity: guarantees that data exchanged between the person requesting it and the provider has not been modified or tampered with by a third non-authorised party.
• Non-repudiation: guarantees that the sender of a message cannot deny, later, that she/he sent it.

Provided that FAST platform addresses all these security issues, this tool will be used to implement the security framework to support the needs of the GVA eProcurement system. FAST will be in turn, supported by the GVA PKI infrastructure to manage the Public Key certificates for identifying the user and for securing the communication between the users of the application and the servers that host the application environment (Web Server), and the corresponding business logic (Application Server).

Future perspectives

FAST provides openness and transparency in information access for communications between citizens and their administrations.
Through FAST, public administrations can streamline their operations by switching their document management systems onto an electronic platform. Documents can be exchanged securely and efficiently in electronic format, between different agencies and different levels of the administration. FAST streamlines back office processes and makes document exchange easier. It thus lightens the load of administration officials. Authorities are required to exchange notifications on the occasion of marriages, deaths and other life events requiring certification, and are also required to exchange data and information
concerning local authorities decisions with the Ministry of Interior. All of this documentation is easily exchangeable through FAST. Furthermore, procedural burdens are lessened for citizens – for example, they will no longer have to ask for a copy of a birth certificate where it is required for a benefit application.
By reducing the time required for dealing with administrative demands and the associated costs, FAST thus makes a contribution to improving government efficiency in Europe. By deploying FAST in different administrations across Europe, citizens throughout the European Union can share in these benefits.

Duration of the Project

The project will last two years, from January 2007 to December 2009.

Funding source

Public funding EU, Public funding regional, Public funding local, Private sector

Project size

€6,700,000

Links

• Website
• eTEN portal
• ePractice portal

Themes

• Documents
• Secure
• exchange

Contacts: