Building Block

A building block (from the English term Building Block, also known as BB) is a Stavební blok (or part thereof) that:

• provides central shared functions (as services) to all (many) eGovernment actors (participants), or to many other functional units, or
• represents a repeatable pattern of unified local functional units
• is always managed with central accountability (governance).

The EU through the European Reference Architecture for Interoperability defines architectural (logical) and solution (physical) building blocks in accordance with the TOGAF methodology. To support Member States in building interoperable public services, the EU formulates the main architectural building blocks and interface standards between these blocks.

In terms of the governance of EU eGovernment structures, the EU sees the building blocks and the responsibility for them at the fourth, operational level of eGovernment governance.

A building block is used in one of the following four ways:

1. It is built by one OVS by law and provided free of charge to others as a central shared service.
2. It is built by one OVS and its software facilities are provided to others under an open license (as Open Source) for their own implementation (on-premise) in the OVS.
3. It is jointly purchased based on a single standard and a single specification (e.g. by a dynamic purchasing system) - this applies to both Cloud and On-Premise.
4. It is individually purchased and built by each OVS according to a prescribed standard (architecture, functional and non-functional specifications).
5. There is another, as yet non-functional and unapproved option:
6. It is built by a single OVS (or a mandated commercial entity) to be provided for a fee (e.g. through a budget transfer).

It is essential that a key eGovernment building block is identified and described by its nature and purpose, not by its project name or server name. For example, the eGovernment building block is the functional unit State Treasury, or the sub-functional unit Central State Accounting, but it is not IISSP. Or vice versa IISSP as BB should be seen as functional_unit across all 4 layers of the architecture.