ICT governance hub

The IT Governance Hub supported a two-day online peer-assist event (held on 17–18 November) at the request of the Parliament of South Africa, which needs to produce services and products in 11 official languages and is constantly looking to improve its working practices. Specifically, the CIP was asked to assist with inter-parliamentary benchmarking on innovations and good practices in the following areas: digital document and records management, digital printing services, language support services, Hansard production, and library and information services. The IT Governance Hub invited experts from the European Parliament to share experiences on language services, including translation through speech-to-text, interpretation and reporting services. It also facilitated contributions by experts from the Parliament of Kenya, the Senate of Spain and the House of Commons of Canada.

On 24 October, the Open Data Hub (hosted by the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil) and the IT Governance Hub (hosted by the European Parliament) brought the 2022 Transforming Parliaments webinar series to a close with a session on the state of open data in parliaments. The webinar included a presentation of the 2022 Open Data Survey results, plus an in-depth round-table discussion on open data publishing and usability with experts from the Saeima of Latvia, the UK Parliament and the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil. Across the year, the sessions were regularly attended by 50–60 participants, including senior IT and information management staff from parliaments, and the two hubs have committed to running a new series in 2023. The recordings of the 2022 Transforming Parliaments webinar can be found here.

The Open Data Hub and the IT Governance Hub have concluded the second edition of the Transforming Parliaments webinar series. The sessions followed up on the first series, which was inspired by the 2021 virtual World e-Parliament Conference, and aimed to continue the conversation among parliamentary innovation specialists. The second series featured discussions on parliaments and the cloud, and on digital transformation in the legislative process and archiving. The sessions were well-attended, with average participation of 60–80 parliamentary staff. To watch the webinars from both series again, see this playlist.

As part of the World e-Parliament Conference 2021, new videos are available for all our thematic innovation hubs.

On 9 October 2020, the Secretaries General of the European Parliament (Mr. Klaus Welle) and the Inter‑Parliamentary Union (Mr. Martin Chungong) signed a memorandum of understanding about cooperating on the IT Governance hub. 

The hub was established by the European Parliament. It is a global expertise network that covers areas such as IT strategy, planning and efficiency. Every day it mobilizes knowledge wherever it is needed. The hub hosts an online learning platform that is currently used by over 50 organizations or parliaments. The platform helps parliaments to improve their IT governance by enabling them to self-assess their digital maturity and deploy other good practices. In addition to online learning, the hub is planning to start capacity‑development activities in collaboration with CIP regional hubs. 

The CIP secretariat and hub coordination team are currently discussing how to increase synergy with the other thematic and regional CIP hubs in 2021. 

The online learning platform for parliaments to support a wide development of maturity in IT governance, continues to grow with 96 individual accesses that have been granted for staff belonging to 52 parliaments and other organizations. Among these, 11 have recorded information related to their IT maturity status.

In the fourth quarter of 2019, the Hub made a presentation together with the Centre for Innovation in Parliament (CIP) at the ICT2019 Seminar (3-4 October) of the European Centre for Parliamentary Research and Documentation (ECPRD) at the Estonian Parliament. It engaged in peer-to-peer support activity with the National Assembly and National Council of Bhutan (25 September), and the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil (18 September) in Brasilia. The Hub will also meet as part of the Thematic Hubs event in Ottawa (18-19 March 2020) which will be the Hub’s first face-to-face meeting since its establishment. The intention is to assess opportunities for further inter-parliamentary collaboration, to promote IT governance concepts and practices, including by sharing digital strategies and potentially taking part in regional training events. Representatives from the Central Service attached to the Cabinet of the Secretary-General and the Directorate-General for Innovation and Technological Support (DG ITEC) of the European Parliament, who host the hub, will facilitate a dedicated meeting in Ottawa concerning a potential new hub on digital archiving that could help parliaments share archiving innovations and practices, as well as guide them at the various stages of their digital archiving services.

The IT Governance Hub hosted by the European Parliament is continuing to register new participants on its online platform: 88 individual accesses have been granted for staff belonging to 48 organizations, including recently the Parliaments of Angola and Moldova. Following several requests, the content of the documents included in the platform is now also available in French, Portuguese and Spanishand. Translation was done using the automatic translation engines of the eTranslation service provided by the European Commission. In addition, on top of self-development through the various paths proposed, the platform can be used to support five different types of events: presentations, peer-to-peer support, support to a regional hub, thematic exchange, and train the trainers. A new section has been introduced to list the events that have been performed / planned.

Finally, from 11 to 12 July 2019, the representative of the IT Governance Hub took part in the kick-off of the INTER PARES project in Brussels (hosted by the European Parliament). Following discussions, it was agreed in the context of the project that the IT Governance Hub will be invited where possible to introduce the development of the IT governance capacity during peer-to-peer support with selected parliaments from partner countries.

The ICT Governance hub has grown to 81 individual accesses for staff from 46 organizations to its online learning platform for parliaments, which supports the development of maturity in IT governance. A representative of the European Parliament took part in the May 2019 meeting of the Open Data Hub in Brasilia to share and contribute with knowledge, but also to explore further synergies between hubs. Discussions are being held with the regional hubs for East Africa and Southern Africa—which have identified IT governance as a focus area—on potential follow-up activities including awareness-raising and capacity-building.

Image: Map displaying the parliaments that joined the ICT Governance e-learning platform. © European Parliament

The IT governance hub is an online learning platform for parliaments to support a wide development of maturity in IT governance. Since the hub’s launch at the World e-Parliament Conference in December 2018, 77 individual accesses have been granted to the IT governance platform for staff belonging to 45 organisations. Among these organisations, 11 have so far recorded information related to their organisation and their IT maturity self-assessment. Following user feedback, a new status ("To be assessed") has been introduced in the system to help differentiate the status of the IT maturity self-assessments. For access to the platform, contact [email protected].