Schengen Agreement: SIS delayed again
01 May 1994
A report from the German Interior Ministry about political cooperation within the EU and between signatories of the Schengen Agreement sheds some light on the considerable delays in development of the computer technology at the heart of the Schengen Information System (SIS).
Since the drawing up of SIS systems' architecture specifications in November 1988 and tendering for the central computer in 1991, the Schengen agreement has got bogged down in technical problems. Not only were the difficulties in communications technology for such a complex system underestimated, but also the system supplier was not able to deliver parts to specifications and to schedule.
In setting the conditions for the central mainframe tender, it was decided to adopt the X-400 communications technology standard as the basis for the SIS. The X-400 standard was chosen so as to ensure the necessary standardization of the SIS's communications links between the central computer (C.SIS) and the national terminals (N.SIS) as recommended in a Dutch report by the Bakenist company; the EU also put forward the X-400 as the future European yardstick for computer communications. Despite these recommendations, it soon turned out that, as the German Interior Ministry puts it, "with our present knowledge, the X-400 standard is only partially suitable for interactive systems such as the SIS due to the fact that a series of extensions had to be added to cover the Schengen system's needs".
In December 1991, the tender for development of the C.SIS was concluded with the selection of the French consortium SEMA (which includes Siemens-Nixdorf and Bull). The selection was made on the condition that the SEMA consortium would improve the price- performance ratio of their offer. This improvement took several months to negotiate as SEMA had identified several "clear weaknesses in the development of the software", but the official contract with SEMA was eventually signed on July 24, 1992. The SIS officials hoped none the less to be able to get the SIS up and running by 31 December 1992, largely by shortening the planned development time of fifteen months. But this was not to be: in the words of the German Interior Ministry, "it was subsequently noted that SEMA was unable to deliver products on time and up to the required quality specification". The start-up date for the SIS was therefore postponed first to July 1 1993 and then December 1 1993, but SEMA only delivered some of the key operational hardware for C.SIS - N.SIS communication ("User Agent") at the end of 1993, making the rescheduled start-up date of February 1 1994 unrealistic. In December 1993, the Executive Committee called in two independent experts to analyse the delays. In their first report on December 9 1993, the two experts concluded that the research effort required of SEMA had been underestimated and that there were "serious software and specification problems for important components of the SIS". One of the most serious shortcomings identified in the report was the inadequacy of the project management in monitoring the developments of so complex a data exchange system.
Further delays were caused by the discovery of four major malfunctions in an MTA communications component developed Siemens to link C.SIS to the German police network INPOL; two of the malfunctions have since been corrected. The Germans however remain optimistic and hope that the technical operability of the SIS can be achieved during their presidency of the first half- year of 1994. Complete operability will only be reached after a download phase in which the national police and security services copy their files to the C.SIS. But then, as the German Interior Ministry says, "No consensus could be reached amongst Schengen signatories about the scope of data [to be held by C.SIS], although this has a direct impact on the length of the 'download phase'".