A Framework to Analyze Data Governance of Swiss Population Registers

In June 2006 the Swiss Parliament adopted a new law on population registers' harmonization in order to simplify statistical data collection and data exchange from around 4'000 decentralized registers. Besides there are more than 2'000 administrative services delivered to Swiss citizens and businesses, of which hundreds could potentially use data from population registers. The law is rather vague about the implementation of this harmonization and even though many projects are currently being undertaken in this domain, most of them are quite technical. We believe there is a need for analysis tools and therefore in this paper we propose a conceptual framework to analyse data governance of these populations registers, with a strong focus on information requirements and identity management. In order to develop this framework we built on existing approaches to define its building blocks: data consumers, data sources, identity in a given context, requirements, and data sets.