In recent years, Colombia has been working to create a legal framework for public administration entities to agree on the citizen data to be interoperated. In particular, in relation to the protection of personal data. The aim was to be governed by the principles of integrity, availability and reliability, "the triad of information", as defined by José Ricardo Aponte, technical leader of Digital Citizen Services at the Digital Government Directorate of Colombia's MINTIC.

In the framework of a webinar on interoperability organized by the Argentine government, Aponte specified that, within two years, they have managed to add 64 entities mounted on X-Road exchanging information. "Colombia worked hard on data standardization, on managing common languages to exchange data. It is key to be able to manage the ambiguity of information and avoid discrepancies when interpreting the data," he stressed.

For the official, it is key to be technology agnostic on this path. In Colombia there are a large number of entities with legacy systems, lagging far behind in terms of technology. "This is one of the great challenges. We are looking to take X-Road to all entities, so that they understand how information travels in a confidential way because it is mediated by digital certificates, which give security and trust to this scenario," he said.

The interoperability work is part of a larger project in Colombia, "Digital Citizen Services". This is a set of tools that entities can use to build and digitize their procedures. It involves not only interoperability, but also authentication as a process to mitigate the risk of impersonation. On this last point, Aponte said that in the next few days there will be advances on biometric authentication, and pilots on self-managed identity.

At a cross-border level, Colombia and Argentina have outlined an interoperability test that has not yet been completed.