OECD Peer Review of E-Government in Denmark - ePractice.eu

Legal and regulatory barriers
The Danish legal environment is appropriately supportive of e-government, being set up to
enable, not hinder, digital communications. This is the result of both new legislation enabling
e-government processes (e.g. the Act on Electronic Signatures) and efforts to simplify and modernise
the legal environment, with a focus on ensuring that it is compatible with digital communications.
However, despite government achievements in developing a favourable legislative and regulatory
environment for e-government, some perceived challenges related to the complexity of laws and
regulations, and their lack of flexibility, still exist. While part of the problem may relate to continuing
deficiencies in the legal environment itself, it may also indicate limited awareness among government
organisations of the changes that have already been made, which could be impeding them from
making best use of the updated environment. In common with other OECD countries, this may also
underline a general lack of knowledge, capability, drive and innovation in interpreting laws and
regulations, which can lead organisations to incorrectly portray problems as being due to inadequate
laws and regulations, rather than their own capabilities.
Privacy and security
Officials regard issues of privacy and security as being relatively less important challenges for the
implementation of e-government in Denmark, reflecting both a strong environment for data protection
and security, and the generally high level of trust and confidence that Danes have in this aspect of
government operations; due, in part, to their long tradition of providing personal information to a
range of public registers.
Budgetary barriers
A claimed lack of funding for e-government projects is the most important budgetary barrier to e-
government revealed by this review. To the extent that this is a real barrier, it must be viewed in light
of the implementation of the Structural Reform and the Government’s decision to finance the change
process through savings arising from increased economies of scale and gains in efficiency, rather than
with new funds. However, the relative flexibility of e-government funding sources suggests that
complaints about lack of funds to implement e-government do not arise from a tight budgetary
environment itself, but may be linked to a lack of internal flexibility to re-evaluate spending priorities
and reassign funds in the face of budgetary constraints. Although work to address this is underway,
the development and use of common approaches for creating robust business cases for e-government
(which would assist in making such decisions) is still immature in Denmark. A business case tool and
supporting project management methodology has been developed for common use. However, there is
still a need to communicate both its existence and the benefits of using it to government organisations,
in support of its more widespread and consistent application.
Lack of long-term budgeting horizons is also considered by many officials to be an important
barrier to e-government. Some long-term spending mechanisms are already in place (e.g. the ability to
carry forward unused appropriations, and borrowing mechanisms), but it is not clear to what extent
government organisations have effectively used them. This could simply indicate a general lack of
knowledge of existing budget arrangements or, as expressed in interviews, the presence of risk-averse
attitudes towards using these mechanisms.
A particular budgetary challenge frequently mentioned in interviews was the so called
“sow/harvest” problem. This challenge represents the fact that e-government initiatives involving
more than one organisation often lead to disproportionate allocation of costs and benefits, thus
creating differing and sometimes incompatible or perverse incentives for collaboration. The fact that
11