Читать книгу Digital Government Excellence - Siim Sikkut - Страница 80

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.