If several national institutions participate in the agreement, they define an architecture covering national exchanges.
The national architecture focuses on the coordination between the liaison agency and the competent institutions in the country, enabling exchanges with cross-border institutions through the international architecture.
The institution, in coordination with the other institutions participating in the agreement, defines an architecture enabling it to perform international data exchanges in an efficient and secure way.
In the case of multilateral agreements, the international architecture may include a “trusted third organization” storing key common information, such as a log of transactions, digital signatures and certificates.
This section addresses the definition of architectures, specifying the main ICT components that enable the implementation of interaction between institutions putting into practice international social security agreements.
The implementation of agreements involves three architectures:
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:
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:
