[...] Most of the recommendations on this bottlenecks focussed on measures to favour the adoption of common standards. The lack of adoption of standards is seen as a major bottleneck to impact: in the words of the speaker from the Austria, main bottlenecks to integration are government agencies, not companies. Participants agreed that a strategic approach should imply using the full range of possible measures, rather than a simple imposition from the centre. As the speaker from NemHandel put it, “legislation is not enough, you need to provide easy solutions to small vendors”. There should be a “standard strategy” that involves all relevant stakeholders, from the public and the private sector. Government should act as a platform by setting the right incentives for the involvement of different stakeholders, including removing the barriers to engagement for SMEs both as suppliers and as users. In this sense, the experience of NemHandel is a recognized best practice to be recommended: they created open dialogue with vendors and included SMEs through an online forum, and focussed their effort on increasing the adoption of e-invoicing by SMEs. In this way, they were able to create market opportunities both for suppliers and users. This strategy should, first of all, link public funding to the adoption of standard that are already there. Too often e-government projects fund the reinvention of the wheel. Reusing existing standard solutions and adopting open standard should become a pre-requisite to obtain public funding. Standard should be conceived as a dynamic process and there should be competition between standards. The agreement on standards should be accelerated, and existing best practice and front-runners should be clearly identified to enable other agencies to learn from it and adopt similar solutions. This analysis should include best practices from the private sector, such as e-banking. Political support should be gathered to support standard, mainly by providing good evidence on the benefits of it. It’s time to provide a ready-made evidence toolkit in support At the same time, the process for establishing standard should take into account the local situation and context, avoiding a one-size fits-all approach. The debate on the standard should be clearly and openly framed, and should be multi-stakeholders, including different institutional levels, private and public sector.