The Single Digital Gateway (SDG), established by Regulation (EU) 2018/1724, was born to prevent citizens and businesses from having to provide the same information multiple times to European public administrations, thanks to the automatic exchange of data between Member States.
The Single Digital Gateway
The Single Digital Gateway is a European Union initiative aimed at creating a single point of access for citizens and businesses interacting with public administrations across different States. The objectives of this initiative are to simplify interactions with both national and European public administrations, reduce language barriers, and promote national and cross-border interoperability. The European portal created to access the Single Digital Gateway is Your Europe, where citizens and businesses, after identifying the procedure of interest and selecting the administrative process from the service catalogue, are linked to the digital service of the competent public administration.
The “once only” principle
The key concept of this system is the European “once only” principle, according to which citizens and businesses are not required to provide the same information more than once to public administration, as it can be automatically exchanged between different Member States through an interoperability system called the Once Only Technical System (OOTS), which is a Single Digital Gateway strategic component. This interoperability system manages the process of data transmission, whereby data are retrieved from their original source, validated, and sent to the requesting party using transport protocols, in accordance with the standards established.
Each Member State is responsible for adapting its national systems to the OOTS and for connecting the so-called data service providers (administrations that hold the data) and data requesters (administrations that request the data). The European Commission supports this process through technical coordination activities, cross-border testing, and monitoring the level of compliance of individual States.
The organisations involved
For Italy, the management of the Single Digital Gateway, which also includes a dedicated portal, has been entrusted to the Department for European Affairs in coordination with Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale (AgID) and the Department for Digital Transformation of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, which has included the initiative in a specific sub-investment under measure 1.3.2 of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR).
Timeline
The implementation of the Single Digital Gateway was completed in 2023, and in January 2024 the monitoring phase for digitalising the procedures began, along with the definition of the data services necessary to guarantee interoperability with other Member States. The Single Digital Gateway should become completely operative starting from the next year.
Conclusions
The European initiative to establish the Single Digital Gateway represents a decisive step towards genuine cross-border integration of digital public services and, in many respects, can be seen as a European-scale evolution of Italy’s National Digital Data Platform (PDND). It is an ambitious and forward-looking vision, aiming to make citizens truly digital, enabling them to access services and information without national boundaries.
The Single Digital Gateway will become an essential instrument of European digital citizenship, capable of putting the “once only” principle into practice and making the free movement of services and rights within the Union a reality.