The institution defines administrative principles to manage the main operations and resources of the international agreement.

The main operations include data exchanges based on requests/responses, notifications of changes and relevant information about persons covered by the agreement. The main resources comprise information models of the data exchanged, digital certificates and signatures, and the software systems to be used for the implementation.

The institution establishes a strategy and an action plan to implement the international social security agreements.

The institution defines its mission, roles and governance structure to implement the operations of the international social security agreements under its mandate in order to protect the social security rights of migrant workers.

If applicable, the institution participates in defining the governance structure for the international and inter-institutional levels.

The specific guidelines in this section are:

• Governance and management of the ICT-based implementation of international agreements
• Strategy and action plan
• Administrative principles for the main operations and resources of the agreement

International social security agreements make possible the portability of benefits for millions of insured people and generate the export of billions of dollars in cash benefits around the world among signatory countries. This involves significant cross-border data exchange and back-office information processing. The effective and reliable implementation of agreements therefore requires an intensive application of ICT to ensure the integrity of the process.

The institution carries out ICT operations to enable the use of the master data system in compliance with the corresponding service-level agreements (SLAs).

The institution continuously monitors the availability and performance of the master data systems. Interruptions and malfunctioning of the master data systems should be prevented by setting up alarms that would warn the ICT team of an SLA violation (i.e. event, incident or problem).

The ICT operations of master data systems comprise the system administration activities that enable the use of the master data in the institution.

Given the critical nature of the master data system, the corresponding ICT operations have to ensure the service quality levels (e.g. availability, performance, etc.) required to carry out the social security operations using these data. Such quality levels are established in a service-level agreement (SLA).

The specific guideline in this section is:

The institution establishes a framework for the management of the security and privacy of the master data based on the relevant regulations.

The institution implements effective and quality-preserving interoperability mechanisms not only with other systems within the institution but also with external systems.

In addition to providing the means of interaction with other systems, interoperability mechanisms should keep track of the provenance of data obtained from other institutions.

The institution puts into practice specific processes to manage change, maintenance and the evolution of the master data system.

As the master data system is at the core of the institution’s information systems and is used by a large number of systems, change and evolution have to be managed so as to minimize impacts and service disruptions. Therefore, the information model of the master data system should reflect the concepts used throughout the institution.