Accenture's fifth annual global e-government study

Sweden
2004 Rank: 4 (joint)
2003 Rank: N/A
2002 Rank: N/A
Vision introduced: 2000
Vision title:
The 24/7 Agency
Vision summary:
The eGovernment vision is not only one of leveraging
information technology to facilitate easy,
24/7 access to the public sector for citizens—it is
also a vision of transforming the public sector into
a customer-focused service provider, which demands
radical changes of organizations, processes and
attitudes. The vision is to have a network of agencies
that cooperate to serve the citizen.
Regular Internet users (percent of population):
80.42 percent
Regular Internet users who have ever visited an
eGovernment site: 74 percent
Sweden
Sweden is a new addition to our research and debuts
at an impressive number four (joint with Australia,
Finland and Denmark), with an overall maturity of
58 percent. Its service breadth (92 percent), depth
(65 percent) and customer relationship management
maturity (54 percent) were all above average.
Gunnar Lund, the deputy minister for Finance, was
given responsibility for public administration policy
when he was appointed minister for International
and Economic Affairs and Financial Markets in
October 2002. Since then, he has made it clear that
his priority in this area is to accelerate the development
of the “24/7 Agency”—the Swedish vision of
a public administration using information and
communications technology to be able to deliver
services 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The 24/7 Agency concept was introduced in the action
program “An Information Society for All,” presented
in 2000 by Prime Minister Göran Person and former
Minister for Industry and Trade Björn Rosengren.
This action program aimed to make Sweden the first
country to become a true information society for
the benefit of all its citizens.
The vision has been refined and updated since that
time. Essentially, the Swedish government’s goal is
to provide access (irrespective of office hours and
location); high-quality services and responses; openness
to users’ opinions and ideas on how to improve
public administration; simple, fair rules; and optimal
benefit to users through collaboration, continuous
assessment and development of activities.
However, the Swedish model of government is very
decentralized, with individual agencies enjoying great
autonomy. As such, there is no central eGovernment
action plan. While general eGovernment frameworks
for the agencies are put in place by central government,
agencies set their own targets and means of
reaching those targets. Action plans, therefore, vary
significantly among agencies.
Although there is no central action plan for
eGovernment, the country’s overall progress is
measured by the Swedish Agency for Public
Management, which conducts studies in this area.
So far, studies by two different independent companies
have been done annually. One, a Nielsen
Netratings study monitoring user numbers and
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