The pandemic has undeniably more or less forced everyone to become even better at digitalization. Identity Access Management (IAM) plays a big part when it comes to keeping digital information safe.
Psst – Want to learn more about digitalization in municipalities? Check this out!To be honest, it’s been a combination of nice and boring, but I believe I’ve finally found a good balance in my life where I choose to see the benefits of working from home. We have digital check-ins which certainly makes things easier, and we’re planning a digital workshop between different representatives from Haninge Kommun and TietoEVRY as we speak, which I believe will be very successful.
I’ve worked at Haninge Kommun since 2015. My role covers a lot of areas, and as well as being the Administrative Manager, I’m also the Change Manager. This means that I look at proposed changes coming from ourselves or our partners and decide which ones work and which ones doesn’t. My background, however, is in the private sector, which I believe gives me the benefit of being able to apply learnings from completely different areas to the work I do at Haninge Kommun. First and foremost, it’s my job to ensure that our IT department delivers quality in everything that we do. This, in turn, creates a quality experience and service to our citizens. The expectations of deliverable results and areas of responsibility has certainly changed a great deal since I first started; nowadays the IT department is responsible for serving our whole department with everything from technical platforms, internal services, networks, telecom, core business applications, and much more. On top of this, it’s our job to make sure we keep every bit of information and data safe.
It’s very important for all of us at Haninge Kommun to keep up with the pace of digitalization that’s sweeping across the society in general. We might not be at the forefront of digitalization, but we are becoming more digital than ever. As we recruit younger people, we see a gradual shift in how we look at digital services and how we approach digitalization in general. However, we’re not a private company, and we can’t simply decide to make all our services digital and demand that every user has a Mobile Bank ID-app installed and ready to go; we have to look to every individual need. My mother is a perfect example to illustrate this; she has no digital form of ID (nor does she want one). She is still as eligible as everyone else to receive the services we can offer her, regardless of how she comes to order them. To put in simply, it’s our job to create digital services for those who wants to use them, and it’s also out job to ensure that everyone can access the services they want and need; be it digitally or not.
There are two main things we look at when it comes to digitalizing a service. Firstly, the aim is to save time for our citizens by making it easier for them to apply for and use of our services, combined with a bigger transparency in the process which means that you’re able to track your request online instead of having to make a call. Secondly, we’re aiming to offer a more standardized, safe service that reduces the amount of time spent on administration.
In my opinion, this is a very good cooperation. We have regular check-ins with Kristoffer (Kullberg, technical consultant at TietoEVRY), where several representatives from our side and TietoEVRY discuss what works, what doesn’t work and what we see happening in the future for us. For me, it’s the continuous communication that stands out the most – I feel perfectly safe knowing that I’m always able to pick up the phone for some quick advice or support if I should ever need it. We’re not just talking about reports or the daily IT-operations in our check-ins; we spend a lot of time to draw up ideas for the future and come up with new ideas together. It’s not always the case that we’re able to go from idea to reality, but by merely discussing these ideas, we’re spurred on to become even better at digitalization.
Me and Kristoffer at TietoEVRY talked for a long time about how we could improve the so-called identity portal, where the digital identities are being created. Thanks to a new script, we’re not risking that a returning employee receives the same access they had before. So not only does it take less time to create a new digital identity; the process is much safer than before. We’ve automated a lot of manual processes, meaning that employees receive the access they should have (no more, and no less), quicker than ever before. This is a fairly simple implementation, but it would never have been on the agenda if not for the great cooperation between our team and TietoEVRY, and the genuine dedication of everyone in the whole team contributing to improving our services.