Today I was informed about an article on the website “futuregovernment.asia” that deals with a representative from the Danish Ministry of Finance has attended a conference as a speaker and as such he unofficially revealed what the future e-government plan for the Kingdom of Denmark deals with.
Mr. Lars Frelle-Petersen who is the deputy general and head of the digital task force agency for government management has according to Xinghui Guo @ “futuregovernment.asia” layed out the strategy to deal with:
- End of paper applications and regular mail.
- Helping companies with higher growth rates.
- Bringing “welfare technologies” into hospitals, schools, nursing homes in order to deliver a bigger bang for the bug.
- Close cooperation in order to ensure digitalization of the public sector.
What is particular funny with this approach is that this particular strategy hasn’t been published in Denmark but on a conference in Singapore before the general public was aware of these initiatives from the Danish government.
My commentary
This approach could indicate that the Danish Government (or rather the current Danish Cabinet) might go even further than the usual approach to Government 2.0 and as such start to work with a radical business process re-engineering approach in order to reform the public sector.
There are many good reasons for the Danish government to do so e.g. a large part of the workforce is old enough to go on retirement and the younger generations aren’t big enough to take over all of their jobs in the public sector, thereto since Denmark was the first country to be hit by the global financial crisis it is evident that the Danish government is trying to limit its costs by reducing redundant and often unnecessary processes and services.
On the other hand the Danish governments’ approach to dealing with major IT-related projects are usually indicating that major IT-related scandals and flops would occur and as such I can only advice the government to implement this strategy in an incremental fashion and in a decentralized fashion where the politicians haven’t direct control of the progress and implementation of individual projects that in turn will be the crystallization of the e-government strategy.
