Sweden is fantastic. A lot of exciting development initiatives are being carried out across the country’s municipalities, regions, and authorities. Unfortunately, the distribution of these initiatives is uneven, and they rarely reach broader use beyond the organization where the development takes place. Each organization bears the cost alone, and no organization benefits from the successes of others. This needs to change.
Digital solutions are fundamentally associated with zero marginal cost. As part of this, they can quickly be transferred from one environment to another without any theoretical cost. Code can be shared or made open, and an investment made in digital development in, for example, Ödeshög municipality, could benefit all the other 289 municipalities. This is an advantage unique to the public sector, given its governance model and lack of competition.
However, we have not taken this into account when building and maintaining our IT and development environments. Through our studies, it is evident that development is rarely even made accessible within the organization’s boundaries and often gets stuck, for example, in an individual administration. Research is clear that the solution to this is increased transparency, where all development initiatives are made available and visible to all parts of the organization.
However, with the launch of www.pios.se, we are taking a step further. Together with all public organizations in Sweden, we are making all development initiatives transparent across the sector. This can be seen as part of the movement around public money public code, which is, for instance, a central component of Switzerland’s national strategy. If a region develops digital solutions for, e.g., self-monitoring that can help the region fulfill its mission, it represents a significant investment. This investment creates both strengthened competence and knowledge within the organization, as well as code and experiences that are fully shareable. But currently, none of this is being shared systematically and efficiently in Sweden.
Previous attempts to achieve the sharing of experience and knowledge have failed because they relied entirely on the engagement of a few individuals. These individuals have made outstanding contributions in forums like Dela Digitalt, but this has not created an infrastructural resource for the sector as a whole. The available data has not been real-time, meaning it has not been possible to track the progress of initiatives, and the data has not been stored in a structured manner that allows for the analysis of larger patterns. Nor has it been comprehensive, leading to only a fraction, a non-representative fraction of experiences and potentially valuable insights being made available.
If we could create transparency around all digital development initiatives, we would have the conditions for radically scaling good digital solutions across the country. We could ensure that most healthcare accidents are avoided, that all our elderly have increased autonomy and security, that our children have better opportunities to succeed in school, that we significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, and more, simply from solutions that already exist but have not yet been scaled nationally. When viewed from this perspective, it is striking that more efforts are not made to achieve national transparency. Without this transparency, neither learning, collaboration, nor scaling of societal benefits is possible. Accepting this while we face significant challenges should be seen as a systemic failure, and allowing it to continue is a fundamental failure.
We have previously discussed the absurd lack of a deeply rooted sense of urgency in our public sector. Despite having access to highly accurate analyses of demographic changes, growing inequalities in welfare, and the increasing breaches of the social contract, we still only address these issues in a routine manner through continuous improvements. Most organizations we studied lack an overview of how much they allocate to development, and they lack an understanding of which initiatives they are driving and what they aim to achieve. This is, from our perspective, far from acceptable. The cost of this is found in decay, an impossible equation, and significantly increasing risks to welfare.
The way forward is to ensure national transparency regarding digital development initiatives as a first step. The next step is to strengthen cooperation (truly) by beginning to reuse and build upon each other’s efforts instead of building independently from scratch. The subsequent step involves actively pursuing scaling at a national level, designing policies to achieve this, and following up on national scaling. The way we need to do this is by sharing what we do within our respective organizations and viewing this sharing as the foundation of taking responsibility for society. Not sharing is counterproductive to societal benefit, which should be considered misconduct.
Through our studies, we are fully aware that the transparency we are calling for is not easy to achieve. It will require changing power structures, and it will be challenging and, in parts, intimidating for organizations designed to be self-sufficient. But it is only by increasing transparency by sharing all our initiatives, both successful and less successful ones, that we can ensure societal benefits at a completely different level than before—at a level that matches the magnitude of the challenges we currently face.alike.
For additional information, please reach out to Professor Johan Magnusson.