The Danish Government published its new digitisation strategy for 2011-2015 in August 2011. The central aim of the strategy is that by 2015 digital self-service solutions will be established as the normal way for citizens to interact with the public sector.
The new strategy, called 'The digital road to future prosperity', aims to phase out paper-based forms and postage. So citizens will use the Internet for all applications and notifications to the public sector, such as when they move, when they enrol a child in a nursery or when they order a new passport. In addition, all citizens and businesses will automatically be given a free digital mailbox to which all communications from the public sector will be sent. By 2015, therefore, interactions of citizens and businesses with the public sector will be entirely paperless.
Those citizens who are not proficient in IT will still be able to get help from local service centres or over the phone. Alternatively, they may choose to provide a digital power of attorney to their relatives, so that their family can easily help them, even across geographic distances.
The new digital strategy has a broad scope and aims to provide digital solutions across the public sector. It provides 60 individual initiatives, including:
- A commitment to, and investment in, IT and digital learning resources in primary schools.
- An action plan for the national dissemination of good and effective telemedicine solutions such as the monitoring of patients with diabetes or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). This benefits patients since they are able to stay at home in a safe environment, as well as reducing the costs to the healthcare services.
- Vocational initiatives to provide businesses with easier paths to growth. This includes fully digital written communication between the public sector and businesses from 2013.
The initiatives of the digitisation strategy have a total budget of DKK 426.4 million (€57 million, approximately). Public sector digitisation initiatives will have DKK 325 million (€44 million, approximately), of which municipalities finance 40 % and regions 20 %, and DKK 101.4 million (€14 million, approximately) is allocated to vocational education digitisation initiatives. In addition, the Government has allocated DKK 500 million (€67 million, approximately) and the municipalities up to DKK 1 billion (€134 million, approximately) for IT in schools.
Denmark published its first digital strategy for the public sector in 2001. Since then, the Government, municipalities and regions have worked closely together on digitisation, and have initiated the transfer of resources from administration into public services, and have streamlined and automated workflows across the public sector. This has resulted in digital solutions such as the citizen's gateway borger.dk, the digital signature (NemID) and electronic invoicing (NemHandel). It is hoped that the new digitisation strategy will build on these developments and cement Denmark as one of the leading nations in eGovernment.
Claus Hjort Frederiksen, Minister of Finance, said: "There will be no need to spend billions on postage and manual handling. In recent years there has been a considerable emphasis on how we in the public sector organise ourselves, and in this digitisation is an important tool. Digital self-service means that parents can in peace and quiet inform the daycare centre that their children are in bed, or register a change of address with the municipality from their laptops instead of being left with forms and stamps. Digitisation makes life easier for the Danes and frees up billions. It is common sense, and I look forward to rolling out the strategy."
Charlotte Sahl-Madsen, Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation, said: "Digitisation offers citizens a much easier life since contact with the public sector can be managed via PC or smart phone around the clock and medical treatments can be undertaken via telemedicine. Danes are generally very good at using IT in everyday life, so for most it will be quite painless to make the digital method the citizens' first choice, but we must also ensure that those who are not so able in IT and modern technology are not left behind."
http://epractice.eu/en/news/5312648