e-GOVERNMENT IN FINLAND - ePractice.eu

Box 3.2. Lack of financial tools for improving electronic access at the municipal level:
the Finnish Consumer Agency
The Finnish Consumer Agency maintains a network of 180 municipal consumer counsellors (Finland has about
450 municipalities). They are civil servants and the first point of contact for customer complaints. They can, for
example, negotiate with a shopkeeper on behalf of a consumer over a purchase dispute.
While services are delivered in partnership with municipalities, the agency’s lack of influence over resource
allocation at the municipal level has sometimes been an important challenge for online service delivery. Municipal
consumer counsellors have access to an extranet containing information for resolving consumer questions and
exchanging information on cases. Service quality can vary, however, with the quality of municipal tools and Internet
access. As an official of the agency explained: “Some municipalities have a lot and some have nothing, but from the
point of view of citizens they should all have equal services. In a recent presentation, one municipal counsellor asked:
‘can you e-mail me the presentation without pictures because my modem is so slow?’ Public libraries provide good
access, but there is a pecking order in municipal budgets for IT equipment, so engineers might get new equipment,
but economic counsellors tend to be a lower priority.”
Municipalities have asked the agency to provide funding for the purchase of new equipment. Ten years ago, this
would have been possible, but changes in state subsidies to municipalities have eliminated the earmarking of funds
for different projects in order to improve flexibility. They can no longer tell municipalities what to do with the funds
they receive.
Key Points - 16
x -Decentralisation of spending authority has reduced the ability of central government to
promote specific aspects of electronic service delivery at the local and regional level
3.3 Technological barriers
106. Technology constitutes a basic prerequisite for e-government advancement. In the OECD survey,
respondents did not consider it the most important challenge (compared to leadership and the development
of skills – see Part 4.5, “Back-office changes”), but nonetheless recognised its importance. The following
part reviews the main challenges that technology and information management pose to ministries and
agencies and why some organisations face particular challenges.
3.3.1 Relative importance of IT challenges
107. The OECD survey asked ministries and central agencies to indicate which factors concerning
technology and information management had been a challenge or a constraint when implementing egovernment.
In the Finnish context, information management comprises those “operations which develop
and maintain the information reserves, information technology services and information processes of an
organisation”. Figure 6 illustrates the relative importance of the ten different ICT challenges.
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