e-GOVERNMENT IN FINLAND - ePractice.eu

“lack of standards for quality, design, branding of portals/Web sites for service delivery” was the third
most frequent important or very important challenge cited by respondents.
257. Finnish IT officials interviewed were largely aware of strategies used both in Finland and
internationally – organising topics around life events or target populations, showing the most frequently
accessed topics – to make information easier to find and more accessible for users of Web sites and portals.
258. In April 2003 a working group set by the Ministry of Finance proposed a common quality and
evaluation criteria for the network services maintained by municipalities and (federal) local authorities.
The goal is to evaluate the quality of traditional as well as electronic services from the point of view of the
customer, i.e. testing the ease of use and the reliability of services.
259. OECD interviews clearly indicated that portals are popular. The survey showed that 81% of
respondents are connected to some kind of portal (see Box 4.4). Of those that are not, only one respondent
was from a ministry (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), whereas 23% of agencies reported that they are not
connected to the government portal. This is also true for portals in general, as illustrated by Figure 19;
ministries are more likely than central agencies to be linked to portals. One reason may be the fact that all
ministries except one were involved in building the citizen portal. This demonstrates the importance of
user involvement in order to increase awareness, relevance and quality of content.
260. Concerning links with sites outside of the central administration, 30% of respondents reported
that their main portal is integrated with regional or local public organisations, 14% that their portal is
integrated with business portals while only 5% that it was integrated with portals of civil society
organisations. Ensuring links outside of government remains a challenge, in part owing to the large number
of potential partners, but also because of worries about data quality and the logistical problem of having to
maintain links.
261. With regard to other kinds of portals, 44% of respondents reported being connected to a thematic
portal, while 26% reported being connected to a specific user group portal and only 12% were linked to a
portal for a specific geographic area.
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