What barriers typically arise when implementing X-Road?
- Petteri Kivimäki
Implementing the central components of X-Road is quite straightforward technically – meaning that the central components of X-Road are up and running, and member organisations can join the ecosystem. When it comes to member organisations, it’s typical to have the chicken or the egg problem in the beginning – service consumers are not willing to join because there are no services, and service providers do not want to join because there are no potential consumers. Therefore, it’s important to get some very popular services available immediately in the beginning that attract consumers to join. In example, starting with the population and business registers will help others to build new services for citizens and businesses.
Another potential barrier is that the costs of joining X-Road are covered by member organisations, but the biggest benefits and savings are usually realized on state level. Therefore, some organisations may not be willing to join since they are not getting direct benefits immediately. Getting benefits on the member organization level requires that an organization starts to use X-Road widely in its integrations. When looking at a price and required implementation effort of a single integration, a traditional point-to-point integration is easier and faster compared to the first X-Road based integration. The following X-Road based integrations then are easier compared to custom point-to-point integrations.