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

The national portal www.denmark.dk
This portal is Denmark’s official international Web site providing an online entry point for anybody interested in a
wide range of information about the Danish State, economy and society. The content of the portal is provided by a
wide range of government organisations, and private and public companies. Launched in 2002, the portal’s
funding is assured through 2005. The Ministry of Foreign of Affairs has overall responsibility for the portal, which
is maintained and run by the National IT and Telecom Agency.
The business portal www.virk.dk
The business portal provides Danish businesses with access to a wide range of both public and private sector
information and services. The portal was developed as a Private-Public Partnership under the mandate of
eErhverv – a service association consisting of the Ministry of Economy and Business Affairs, the Ministry of
Employment, the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, the Ministry of Environment, municipalities and
Danish regions. A large number of Danish government organisations and businesses contribute content to the
portal.
The Danish counties portal www.arf.dk
This portal is operated by Danish Regions. It provides an overview of the structure, functions and administration
of Danish counties for citizens and businesses, and serves as an entry point to information resources and tools
used for the administration of individual counties. It also provides news about Danish counties.
The Danish municipalities’ portal www.kl.dk
This portal is provided by Local Government Denmark. It fulfils essentially the same functions as the counties
portal.
Overall, Danish government makes significant use of portals and survey results indicate that this
will increase. Given the fact that portals are currently the main channel by which government is
pursuing more user-focused delivery of e-government, it is notable that there is no overarching
government policy or strategy regarding the development and operation of portals, or mandating
organisations’ participation in them. In this absence, Denmark has developed a disparate array of
portals that feature different technical and information architectures and, like organisation-level Web
sites, present their users with widely varying approaches to visual design and navigation.
The lack of an overarching approach to portals (and potentially also organisation-level Web sites)
– either as a stand-alone initiative or as part of a wider multi-channel service delivery strategy – may
be having a negative effect on both the degree of user-focus that can be achieved by each individual
portal, and the overall coherence and user-focus of government services that is a goal of the Danish
e-government strategy. It may also be having a negative effect on the efficiency of resource use in
delivery of e-government (for example, through failure to fully leverage economies of scale or
duplication of efforts etc).
Any negative impacts on user-focus arising from the current situation regarding Danish portals
may be being felt most acutely by citizens, who are faced with a larger number of portals where they
may potentially find information and services than may be strictly necessary. In particular, the
danmark.dk and netborger.dk portals appear to have some significant overlaps in both their
constituencies and functions.
These types of issues have already been identified in Denmark, and some thought has been given
to how they might be addressed. As noted earlier in this chapter, the Government has not yet acted on
relevant recommendations made in the MVTU’s qualitative study of citizens’ e-government
experience (including provision of a single e-government portal for citizens, standardisation of Web
site design and possible use of a life events model to improve supply of co-ordinated e-government
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