e-GOVERNMENT IN FINLAND - ePractice.eu

Figure 4.21. Government-wide leadership and co-ordination challenges selected as “important” or
“very important” by ministries and agencies
Horizontal Co-ordination
Allocation of Responsibilities
Note: see figure 4.20
Joined-up Activities
Vertical Co-ordination
Source: OECD
Vision
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80%
308. Ministries responding to the OECD survey cited all three of the top challenges equally (along
with lack of vertical co-ordination) and were consistently more likely to cite government-wide coordination
challenges. In particular, ministries were much more likely than agencies to see vertical coordination
as a government-wide challenge.
309. Agencies’ seeming lack of concern for vertical co-ordination is surprising because they are most
likely to be in contact with municipal and regional service delivery partners. For example, the Finnish
Consumer Agency provides consumer information directly though its Web site, but citizens get more
personal services by seeing municipal consumer counsellors who can access information from internal
databases through the agency’s intranet (see Box 3.2).
310. Not surprisingly, agencies and ministries that responded that they had an e-government plan were
less likely to find unclear responsibilities with regard to e-government planning and implementation
responsibilities (53% and 61%, respectively). The same was true for advanced agencies, which were a third
less likely to raise horizontal co-ordination as an important or very important challenge (46% vs. 69%)
(Figure 31).
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Agency Ministry