was also the expectation from the boss when we met the first time. He told me three times: deliver, deliver, deliver.
If You Only Had Ten Minutes to Think, What Gave You the Confidence That You Were the Woman for the Job?
Because of my background from before: I had done tough work and handled responsibility in both the private and public sectors already. Also, the people at the ministry were confident that I could handle a situation that was not so good at the time.
I had been taking care of ICT in the second biggest pulp and paper company in Finland. It was also a multinational company and I had had responsibility over multiple countries all the way to China. The next five years at the State Treasury had given me an understanding on how the government works: what the processes are, how you get money, these sorts of things. I had shown good delivery there; my boss there was very happy with me.
What Is the Institutional Background of the Digital Government Setup in Finland? Why Is the Ministry of Finance in Charge of the Area?
The Ministry of Finance has been taking care of shared or common services in Finland: from financials and human resources to purchasing and real estate. In 2008 or so, the responsibility to steer the municipalities was moved from the Ministry of Interior to the Ministry of Finance. Then they also combined the public sector ICT guidance responsibility there in 2011.
My political boss was the minister in charge of the public administration side in the ministry. We always had two ministers in the house in my time. One handled the state financials, budget, taxation, and such; the other oversaw all the public sector steering, the municipalities, and the common service areas. I did have a civil servant boss as well in the permanent secretary who supported me in how to work with the minister or with the parliament. My own or the government CIO role was officially titled the Director-General of Public Sector ICT Department.
The role is meant for coordination: to get everyone to work together and onboard, to show the direction of where to go. To show what is digitalization and what we want to achieve, what are the benefits. It is a person who needs to put things together, to gather the ideas and persons together, and organize them so that we are able to meet the outcomes. One important part of the role is to negotiate the financials. My staff praised me when I left office that I had gotten all the money we needed!
What Was Going on in the Area of Digital Government in Finland at the Time You Joined?
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.
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
