The e-Framework is an initiative that was initially established by the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and Australia's Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST), which is now the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR). In 2007, the two founding partners were joined by the New Zealand Ministry of Education (NZ MoE) and The Netherlands SURF Foundation (SURF).

The primary goal of the initiative is to facilitate technical interoperability within and across education and research through improved strategic planning and implementation processes. In pursuing this goal it is guided by the following principles:

• a service-oriented approach to system and process integration
• development, promotion and adoption of Open Standards
• community involvement in development of the e-Framework
• open collaborative development activities
• flexible and incremental deployment

The e-Framework will therefore evolve over time. In supporting a service-oriented approach it has the potential to maximise the flexibility and cost effectiveness with which IT systems can be deployed, in institutional contexts, nationally and internationally.

The e-Framework allows the various stakeholder communities to document their requirements and processes in a coherent way, and to use these to derive a set of interoperable network services that conform to appropriate open standards.

By documenting requirements, processes, services, protocol bindings and standards in the form of 'service usage models' members of the community are better able to collaborate on the development of service components that meet their needs (both within the community and with commercial and other international partners).