Accenture's fifth annual global e-government study

techniques to highlight concrete areas for improvement,
particularly with regard to the end user’s
point of view. As part of this project, best practice
services will be rewarded and details will be shared
with other services.
Finland has a number of innovative services that
could act as a model for others. The TV-Fee
Administration of the Finnish Communications
Regulatory Authority (FICORA), www.ficora.fi/suomi,
launched consumer-oriented electronic invoicing in
2003. The government agency is collaborating with
a private-sector entity to enable all Finnish families
that have a TV and an Internet bank account to
receive their TV license fee invoices electronically.
This is the first Finnish agency to launch a complete
electronic bill presentment and payment scheme.
The Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority is
also the sponsor of a new service for domain name
registration (https://domain.ficora.fi). Registration took
more than a week to complete when done manually.
When the new system became operational in
September 2003, the processing time was cut to just
a few minutes. Domain names are now operational
within one hour of being granted. Consequently,
take-up of the service has exploded. Approximately
23,000 new domain applications were submitted
during the first week of the service, 17,000 of which
came during the first 16 hours. Before the launch,
the total number of .fi domain names was approximately
42,000.
The joint service Työeläke.fi (www.tyoelake.fi) of
Pension Insurance Companies and the Finnish
Centre for Pensions was launched in December
2002. This Web service allows citizens to check their
personal employment records to verify whether the
data regarding all pension-accruing employment
(both public- and private-sector) are correct. It
requires authentication through public key infrastructure
with a FineID card, electronic social
security card or online banking authentication. The
innovative service has already received international
recognition, having been chosen as a finalist in an
international eGovernment competition.
While Finland’s eGovernment development is scattered
across different agencies, the country does offer
three separate portals targeted to different end users.
Senaattori is the government’s intranet information
directory, which provides access to internal and
external government and parliament information.
The citizen-focused portal is Suomi.fi (www.suomi.fi).
Yritys-Suomi (Enterprise Finland), www.yrityssuomi.fi
(or in English, www.enterprisefinland.fi), is the portal
for small and medium companies to interact with
government.
However, although there are several portals in
Finland, they presently lack depth. The user is soon
redirected to Web pages of individual organizations
that have no cross-organizational coordination. The
portals themselves do not contain e-services.
In the future, Suomi.fi, Lomake.fi (Finnish public
online forms service), Otakantaa.fi (government discussion
forum for citizens) and Asiointiopas.fi (guide
to online services for citizens) will be developed into
a truly integrated site family. However, this transition
will likely take several years, unless a more
comprehensive development approach is taken.
To build confidence in its maturing eGovernment
program, the Finnish government launched a new
National Information Security Strategy. The strategy
combines the perspectives of the government, trade,
industry, organizations and private citizens into
common information security objectives, offering
guidelines and measures for improving information
security and privacy protection. It is one of the first
strategies internationally that concerns information
security in the whole society. The strategy coincides
with new laws regulating electronic signatures and
privacy in public administration.
Finland has proven itself both an innovator and a
steady performer across its eGovernment services.
The missing piece of its program has been integration
and interoperability through fully functional
portals. Planned enhancements to Suomi.fi may
improve this aspect of eGovernment. However, for
Finland to keep pace with other eGovernment leaders,
these enhancements must be more than cosmetic.
They must enhance the customer-friendliness of government
outlined in its newly devised eGovernment
action plan. Agencies are just now starting to develop
targeted, integrated and truly customer-focused,
end-to-end services. The country will need to continue
down this path to dramatically change the
way services are provided, from both the citizens’
and the agencies’ perspectives.
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