e-GOVERNMENT IN FINLAND - ePractice.eu

Advanced vs. non-advanced
109. The OECD survey divided organisations into “advanced” and “non-advanced” in terms of the
level of electronic services they provided. “Advanced” agencies are those that reported in the OECD
survey that they are currently providing transactional services and/or engaging in data sharing with other
public authorities (Stage 3 and 4 services). For more information, see Part 4.2 and the glossary in
Appendix 4.
110. In reviewing the survey results, it is important to keep in mind that results for all respondents and
for “non-advanced” respondents track closely because the large majority of respondents can be classified
as “non-advanced”. As shown in Part 5.2 (“Electronic services”), only 29% of respondents reported
providing electronic services at Stages 3 or 4, which are considered here as “advanced services”.
111. The majority of respondents at all levels named the four challenges identified above. However,
the relative importance of the challenges differs according to the level of online services (Figure 7).
Figure 3.5. E-government technological barriers: advanced vs. non-advanced
Percentage of respondents rating technology and information management issues “very important” or
“important”
I) lack of standards / quality
G) legislation and regulatory framework
Source: OECD
J) rapid technological change
H) outsourcing
A) lack of ICT
applications/infrastructure
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
F) privacy, security, authentication
112. In general, advanced respondents were less likely to cite technological challenges than nonadvanced
respondents. In particular, they were not very concerned by issues of IT integration. Nonadvanced
respondents, on the other hand, were much more likely to cite all aspects of IT integration, in
particular the relative importance of horizontal IT integration. This could be a cause for concern. As argued
in the OECD’s The E-government Imperative (2003) and as shown later in this report, advanced services
will increasingly need to be integrated among the various ministries and agencies. It is unclear whether the
low level of concern about IT integration among advanced respondents reflects a lack of awareness of this
upcoming need or whether they consider themselves already well-prepared for this challenge. In either
case, the current lack of integrated services implies that this issue has not yet been sufficiently addressed.
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B) IT integration -- internal
C) IT integration -- horizontal
D) IT integration -- vertical
E) shared single point of entry for
common service
advanced
non-advanced