Schengen Agreement: SIS delayed again (1)
01 January 1991
Schengen Agreement: SIS delayed again
artdoc July=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