Читать книгу Digital Government Excellence - Siim Sikkut - Страница 76

There had been the first government-wide digitalization or e-services program called SADe from 2009 to 2015. The program had brought money and a strong coordination mandate to the Ministry of Finance for digital government, and the ministry was giving the money to different ministers for making digital service projects.

The Public Sector ICT Department had been there for three years already but not yet combining the whole of public sector steering together at both the state level and for municipalities. A new agency called Valtori had been created, and a law had been adopted to consolidate the state ICT infrastructure together from all agencies to move their relevant personnel and equipment to Valtori. There was also another law in parliament, giving public sector security services responsibility to our ministry.

In Finland, the government program of the current government sets the agenda for work.¹ Before I joined the Ministry of Finance in 2014, an external study had come out and influenced the government to start work on a nationwide digital government architecture.² It included initiatives such as taking over the X-Road from Estonia and implementing it in Finland.³

We had been given more than a hundred million euros to deliver this program. But it was unclear what to do with the money, although the department had their own public sector ICT strategy before. When I went to the first meeting with all the big bosses, they were asking about what we were delivering with the money and with the X-Road. So, we had to figure out the best way to actually use the money, to figure out what we would want to build. A big part of the money was to be used by the agencies to join the X-Road, but we needed to build central solutions, too, such as the suomi.fi services.