Digital Government Excellence. Siim Sikkut
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needed to build central solutions, too, such as the suomi.fi services.
Tell a Bit More—What Are the Suomi.Fi Services?
We have three hundred municipalities and about eighty agencies in Finland. The plan was to create common base digital services for the public sector so that none of these institutions would have to create the same things themselves. Instead, there are common services that everybody can find, reuse, and be more cost-effective this way. This included electronic identity to connect people to services securely and a digital mailbox for secure communication between people and public sector agencies. There is a service catalog, where all people can find information about all public sector services, and there is a one-stop-shop for citizens to access the digital service and see all their state-held information in one place. All these are part of suomi.fi package.
Our achievement was that we got those common services built and available. Then we got the agencies to use them with money as a support to start using the services and with a law that told them that everybody also had to do it this way. In the end we would not have common services that nobody would use.
What Was Your Own Strategy: What Did You Set Yourself as Concrete Objectives to Achieve?
I wanted to digitalize Finland. But because my initial period was so short, I was really just looking into what were we really supposed to do and what had we promised to do. Things like X-Road implementation and suomi.fi delivery was one of the only high-level priorities handed to us.
In addition, we came up with a set of proposals that were the big reforms or projects that could make a big change for digitalizing Finland. It included things such as making a push for open data. I have always been trying to see the big picture and what creates benefit for Finland. I always said I was working for company Oy Suomi Ab—the country.4 The government was very focused on increasing employment in Finland at the time, so our proposals played into that. For example, doing an income register could allow people to take up more short-term work without upending their unemployment benefits like before.
We actually wanted to make a new full digital government strategy, but then we got a new government with 2015 elections, and digitalization was made a cross-cutting theme in the whole of the government program. We were not allowed to do a strategy of our own, because it was felt that this would duplicate the government program. We made an internal strategy for the department, nevertheless. The government program gave us the concrete overall direction for it.
How Did the Strategy or Your Proposals Emerge?
Of course, you first work with your own department. But we also worked nicely together with CIOs from all ministries to collect ideas and see what the things were that we would like to do together. We did a series of deep workshops to cocreate the strategy.
We also had an advisory board, where we had some ministries but also CIOs from municipalities represented. Politicians also had their coordination group, with some agency heads to talk about what needed to be done or moved forward.
I felt that if I would get everybody behind the strategy, then people do it themselves and I do not need to push. The strategy needs to be created together.
I always say that in an expert organization, if everybody knows where to go and if the target is clear, then people will deliver even if times are a little bit shaky sometimes. You also have to be honest and tell if things are not so good sometimes. But the key is in setting and explaining the goals.
A really useful thing was to go outside Finland to learn. Once I started, I soon went to the meeting of Nordic Government CIOs and then the European Union CIO network meeting. I also went to see some countries' colleagues directly just to understand what they were doing or what was going on in the world. I had worked in public sector only on consolidation of IT services in Finland; I did not know what was happening at the state level in other countries. I wanted to know what others were doing and pick up from them the good things. You also start to learn from good colleagues the things you should not do!
When I went to these international meetings, there was initially a mistrust in the team that I was doing it just for travels and wondering why was I not in Finland. I tried to show the value to the team by always going through in our monthly meetings what I had learned abroad: what were the other countries doing and how. It was a way to create trust that I was really trying to figure out what we were supposed to do and what are the good things to get done.
What Mechanisms Did You Have for Coordination and Leading across the Public Sector?
First of all, we had a governance structure with different government bodies where we were able to express what we wanted or to jointly agree on which steps we needed to take. What worked best was doing workshops together with all other CIOs from ministries and local governments to create a path together. Then everybody already had bought into the idea because they had been creating the decisions themselves. Our method often was that we split into different groups, each working on the same problem, and then we voted in the end within the whole group on which solution was the best to put to work.
The tool has also been the legislation. We know that when people think that their own solution is the best solution, they do not want to change or give it up—legislation can force them to do that. There also can be a carrot with money, of course. For X-Road implementation, 60 percent of the funding we spent went to agencies and municipalities to use the suomi.fi tools. Even if legislation is in place and an obligation is set, money still helps to really get them to do the work they need to do.
We did get more legislation done in my time. When I left, we already had ten laws in place. One of my learnings is that if you create a project of wider change, such as bringing in digital identity, you should start with the legislation at the same time as you start with the ideas. Then the legislation supports the implementation of the change.
A very important piece was the information management law that was adopted in 2019, which is the law about how government needs to handle and manage information in a qualified, secure, and trustworthy way. But it also has clauses that give a role and mandate to the Ministry of Finance in the digital government steering role. For example, new software projects now need to pass our team's quality check. The team can check them for financials, interoperability, security, the use of common tools, how information management is done. We can use it to push for better and more digitalization, but also to ensure that information gets shared more between the agencies for better services.
We got more levers once we started to deliver, and once we were taken seriously. When we delivered suomi.fi services in time, within scope, and actually for less money than planned—that gave the confidence that what we tell and we promise, we deliver.
Doing Workshops Is a Fine Idea, but It Does Not Have to Lead to Buy-In—How Did You Achieve That?
It depends on how you structure these discussions. When we discussed strategy work in the meetings, we sometimes used outsiders for facilitation, but mainly we ran the sessions ourselves. It was either me or some of our team's experts. We worked out beforehand how we wanted to run the workshop, what we wanted to have as the outcome, the time lines, and methods. So, these discussions were very well prepared.
That is also why those who joined the workshops loved them. Whenever we got the feedback, it showed that participants thought the strategy sessions were the best ones. People got straight to work because everything was prepared beforehand. There was no general discussion only, but working on boards, getting to results, voting on the best ideas, moving on to work on those best ideas.
That is how I have always worked. My earlier boss in the private sector always said: “We do not take or get any consultants; we have Maija!” I am not a consultant but have gotten a lot of practice on cocreation, looking, and understanding together with others the pitfalls