Unplugged: What can Finn-tech offer Jersey?

Wednesday 29 August 2018

It was the country which gave us Angry Birds and also gave us Nokia, which, for a time, was the biggest mobile phone brand in the world... But could 'Finn-tech' have something up its sleeve for Jersey too?

Finland has been working on its own digital economy since the 1980s and is way ahead of us in terms of getting government services online - so when Jersey sets out its stall to become a global digital centre, there are sure to be lessons we can learn, as we already have done from Finland’s neighbour Estonia.

Fortunately, we have one of Finland’s tech experts already at work in the island, and, as someone who worked on integrating their government’s digital services, he has walked the road which Jersey is currently navigating. 

Express spoke to Teijo Peltoniemi, Head of Digital at KPMG, and started by asking him what Jersey’s e-gov project could learn from Finland...

TP: E-government is a really, really important question for any jurisdiction because, let’s face it, it is probably one of the only ways to keep up a sustainable society these days.  

Demographics are getting older, and when people get older they need more services.  So, we need to be able to somehow deliver our services in a cost-efficient way, and digital, definitely is the way to do that.  

Pictured: Finland gave the world Nokia, but could it also provide some local inspiration for the future?

To be able to do that, I think you need to have the basics right so, for example, digital identity, because otherwise you can’t provide those services in a seamless way.

And then you need to have your information and data flows going smoothly, because you want to provide life event-based services, and when you have life events there is normally more than one agency involved; and therefore, you need to be able to weave together many services, from many different agencies.

To be able to do that, you need to have something to integrate them and that is a pain point with any e-gov project around the world: how to actually integrate all those different agencies, and their services, into one seamless service?

When you are able to do that, when those are useable, when those are accessible, people get online, and start using them, and so that is what I do.  

For example, I am living here, but I am from Finland, so I need to still deal with Finland, so I do everything online.  So, if I change address, I can do it online, and I don’t need to fill in any forms, I can authorise my wife to take care of my daughter, if she is in Finland – I can do it online.  

Pictured: eGov must be about integrating all government services in a "seamless" way, Teijo says.

Tax declarations, I think that is probably one of the best examples of really, really good public service, whereby that is done automatically for you, so you do not need to do anything - no paper forms, nothing.  You will be advised when that is done, and then you can check it online, if it’s correct. A lot of people don’t even check it, because they trust it’s done correctly anyway, but it is basically automated for you, and makes life easier.  

Express: And that’s because you have a digital identity in Finland which is secure?

TP: Security is one of the many qualities of a digital service.  You have usability, you have accessibility, and then you have security.

I think security is a ‘citizen skill’ these days, more or less, you don’t jaywalk if there’s a truck coming so, in the same way, you don’t share your password with anyone.

I think, based on my experience, schools are doing very good work there already, so they are educating kids to stay safe and learn.

Pictured: Paperless taxes would be a good digital service for the public, according to the digital expert.

Express: What mistakes has Finland made which Jersey can avoid?

TP: They started early, I don’t know, sometime in the 80s so it has taken a while for them. I think one of the key factors is the physical identity, and identification, as a process. I think that is pretty well done, but there you have an eco-system, which is not provided entirely by the government, so you have banks and telco operators forming their identification framework. 

But they had an integration problem, which was found out to be one of the biggest friction factors. There is friction because all these agencies have their own data sources. Then they went about designing this data exchange layer, and I was actually part of that project and it was one of those programmes where you got all those different agencies together, and then we designed the reference architecture; and that is something probably Jersey should be looking at doing as well. 

Express: We’re talking about the public sector there, but is there anything businesses can learn from that integration?

TP: It is not just for citizens, it is also for businesses. So, one thing to be considered is how to open data sources and make them available to businesses – I think that is one of the key initiatives as well in Finland, and it is quite interesting what sort of possibilities you may have here.  

Pictured: "One thing to be considered is how to open data sources and make them available to businesses."

Take hospitality, you could have the Channel Islands as a platform with open data sources that can be used by say off-island travel makers to weave together interesting vacation packages - like taking a boat from the UK to here, and then going to some of the activities here, and maybe taking a boat to Guernsey or to some other islands.

‘Mobility as a service’ is an interesting concept, which disrupts the way we travel. It’s based on mobile apps weaving together services provided by car and bike hires, public transportation, taxis and so forth, through programmable interfaces, creating individual, optimised travel plans. How people feel about owning their vehicles has changed, as they don’t necessary want to own any more, if the ease of use and cost efficiency is there.

That is one of the ways how digital government can actually support innovation in business.

 But disruption, innovation, they are maybe different things.

So if we consider, for example, the finance industry here, because they tend to serve the high end, they probably haven’t really seen the disruption yet, because disruption starts from the low end of the market, and then moves gradually up to the high end; and then when you are serving just the high end, you realise a little bit too late that you have been disrupted.

Pictured: Jersey's finance industry may not yet have felt the "disruption", Teijo muses.

The potential for innovation, and maybe even disruption, is improving the productivity question - because when you have a lot of manual processes, a lot of dispersed data sources, you are bound to have pretty low productivity.  The process lead-times are slow and error prone, so there is a lot of space to improve using tools like robotics, and these are quite accessible technologies these days which you can use to revitalise your environment.

You don’t need to go right away to streamlining everything and replacing everything, but you can start automating some manual processes bit by bit, and see how it works for you, and then start scaling up - so there is a lot of potential, I would say.

So just making incremental changes, let’s start to use this spreadsheet a little wiser, or let’s take this small piece of software. 

And also, innovation and being innovative is really a culture thing, and it is also a management thing, so you cannot force people to be innovative, like, let’s start to innovate!

Culture-wise, you need to just force the pace where you know your team will follow. It is like gradual change that has to happen at all levels of the organisation, I think. But you can start small.

Pictured: "Culture-wise, you need to just force the pace where you know your team will follow."

Express: What do you think is stopping people from being more open to the fact that they might be disrupted? 

TP: Well you are basically in denial before it happens, so that is how it works every time. I worked for a company called MySQL, which is basically the database technology underlying Facebook and Google and so on; but when they started, they started serving an under-served market, which was small web operators and so forth.  

Back then, you had only Oracle and IBM, big database management system vendors that were considered really, really expensive with really bloated products.  

The web development operators just couldn’t afford it, so MySQL basically targeted them. And what happens? They start to gain traction, more users, more users, they are competing with IBM and Oracle, and before they realise it they are losing to MySQL.  They eventually bought MySQL, but that is how it works.  

Express: Do you see enough innovation in Jersey?  

TP: There is a really good basis for that – the fibre for instance, so that we can get everybody online, we can get really fast connections and so the foundations are there.

Pictured: Teijo says that Digital Jersey and the Internet of Things Lab are examples of innovation on the island.

Then you have Digital Jersey doing a lot of really good stuff, and you have the IOT Lab.

So, basically, I think we are getting there, but I think we can raise a bit the ambition levels. We have the Jersey Tech Fair, so why can’t we have, say, international offshore technology conferences or something like that.

Express: What about cyber-crime, do you think the risk has been over-stated?

TP: No. I don’t think it’s overstated because, let’s face it, cyber-crime exceeded traditional crime in the UK, I read, a couple of years ago. 

You can do a lot by raising awareness, and educating users not do anything stupid - but then I think it is also a responsibility for organisations to provide a secure environment and not blame the user if something happens. Rather than making the users change 1,000 current passwords every week, I think it is really the responsibility for the organisation to provide secure, but also convenient, ways to identify.

People will become much more aware of the consequences of putting their lives online. And you have regulations such as GDPR, which basically targets online services such as Facebook and Google, and how they treat personal data - and it is likely that there will be innovations and new technologies, new platforms whereby the users can take much better control over their personal data.

This article originally appeared in Connect. Read it in full here.