The DECODE screening excercise was launched by the Santer Commission and proved a useful tool in providing basic information for the allocation of portfolios and reorganisation of the Commissions services by President Prodi, as well as providing essential basic data for the administrative reform process.
The fact that the screening exercise was carried out not only by the central services but with the active participation of the operational DGs (some 80 officials were mobilised for this exercise and interviews took place with all of the management of the Commission from Director-General down to Head of Unit) was valuable in itself in that it gave the officials throughout the Commission a sense of involvement in and ownership of the excercise. As a result an exhaustive inventory of the work carried out by the Commission services was produced along with a photograph of the way in which its human resources (statutory and non-statutory) were allocated to this work (by activity and by task) and an overview of the working methods used by the services of the Commission. The data collected was stored in a DECODE database.
Whilst the first objective of the screening exercise was simply to take a photograph of the situtation at that particular time, the resulting reports were of value not only for the descriptive elements but also for the analysis and for the resulting conclusions and recommendations. A large number of these recommendations found themselves in the draft White Paper on Administrative Reform.
The DECODE report covered a diverse range of themes, such as: Best Practices, Duplication of Effort, Performance Indicators, Multisite Questions.
The 47 DECODE reports on individual DGs were distributed to the Directors General concerned and put on the Commission's "intranet" by the end of 1998, so they were effectively available to all Commission personnel, but not to the public. Subsequently in January 2000 a synthesis of the responses of Directors General to these reports, and the action taken, was distributed internally. The 12 Group Reports, were of a more sensitive nature, containing recommendations for future organisation, and were not distributed in their complete form even to the Directors General concerned: a summary of them was later distributed. The final DECODE report was makde available to all personnel of the Commission, transmitted to the European Parliament and published on the Commission's website in 1999 8but by 2003 it had been removed).

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