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22 Sep 2004

How like Finland do we want to be?

One of the best presentations we ever saw on the culminating effect of comprehensively e-enabled government was from the head of statistics Finland, Pekka Myrskyla, shortly before he retired. 

He showed an array of graphic slides based on data gathered from the Finnish national census. Finland now does the census every year, it takes hours rather than months, there’s ten times as much data and even so the cost of doing it is down 75%.

Instead of sending out forms or people with clipboards, the statistics office census computer simply interrogates the half-dozen official registers of businesses, people, dwellings etc and aggregates the data. This depends on having unique and comprehensive registers. Here Companies House has one for registered businesses in the UK and DVLA one vehicles but the idea of yet another one for people is a bit of an issue.

It seems pretty ideal to be able to measure the effects of government policies (say on job creation, commuting patterns etc) very quickly. Finland is very open with public information (FoI law dates back to 1766) it’s much clearer to people what’s really going on. And it’s good to cut the hassle and cost of doing a census.

But this approach does depend on having single sets of clean and accurate data, and that depends on people trusting goverment to hold their data safely and with proper respect for their dignity and rights.

It seems to me that lots of the things we’re trying to achieve (efficiency, better services etc) become possible when people are happy with government holding vastly rationalised databases. This prospect raises a lot of fears which are all too easy to justify, and certainly have not been effectively allayed.

So it would seem that the very first and most important step on the path to efficiency and better services is to ensure that everyone who asks can be convinced that when government holds sensitive data it is treated as highest priority that it be anonymised and encrypted, access and use heavily circumscribed, with harsh penalties for abuse.

Finland seems oddly different in many ways. People have to report to Maistratti (often located in police stations) to be registered once a year, but trust in government seems to be very high. It’s an open question to me - in our quest for ideal e-enabled public services, how like Finland do we want to become? After all, when the Gulf Stream stops we’ll have pretty much the same weather. 

• Posted by William Heath on 22/09/04 at 10:14am
• Categories · "What do we want?" · Across the Board
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Ideal Government

Let's say what we want from e-enabled government. Let's observe government first-hand. Let's say "Wouldn't It Be Better If" (WIBBI). Become an ethnographer of bureaucracy today! It beats getting frustrated with public services.

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