City of Helsinki streamlines government processes

To read a Finnish language version of this case study, click here.

The City of Helsinki has many civic responsibilities, including healthcare, education, transport, infrastructure, housing, harbors and energy, spread across a total of 35 departments. The highest decision-making organ in Helsinki is the city council, which makes the most important financial decisions, as well as those related to city administration. Committees, boards and individual officials are also responsible for decision-making in their own specialist areas.

The concept of transparent government has a long history in Finland, and has been enshrined in its constitution for nearly 250 years. As part of this governmental philosophy, Helsinki’s city council meetings have been open to the public for around 100 years, and broadcast on TV and online for the last four.

Ensuring transparency

Although there was a legal requirement to make government information transparent, The City of Helsinki’s 35 different departments all used their own IT systems, making it difficult for members of the public to gain insights into civic matters.

“Previously, citizens interested in proposing something to local government would have to know the exact department to direct their petition to,” says Eila Ratasvuori, Administrative Director of the City of Helsinki. “If a proposal was sent to the wrong department, it would have to be redirected internally until it reached the official whose remit it fell under. Because of the lack of integration and automation, routing a request to the correct authority could take some time.”

As part of his campaign promise, the newly-elected mayor of Helsinki announced a project called ‘Open Helsinki’ to redesign Helsinki’s government processes using a consolidated case management system. The project also aimed to reduce the City of Helsinki’s reliance on inefficient paper processes.

“Proposals for matters to be discussed in council meetings used to have to be sent kilometres by post between departments and to the homes of part-time elected officials,” says Eila Ratasvuori. “This slowed down the decision-making process and generated a lot of paper – we had to employ 80 registrars to register these matters and several messenger service firms to distribute paper copies of proposed motions to over 600 politicians.”

Interdepartmental communications also suffered under the City’s legacy system. “In the past, if city councillors or the media wanted to check on the progress of committee business, they’d have to phone the department in question to get the most up-to-date information,” says Eila Ratasvuori. “We realized that if our information could be digitized and made available from a central location online, we’d be able to solve many of our pain points.”

The City of Helsinki wanted to increase transparency, streamline decision-making and reduce its paper processes. In order to achieve this, the City needed to bring all the registrars into the city hall and implement a consolidated, scalable and user-friendly case management platform that would better integrate information across government departments.

Choosing a solution

After a thorough two-year planning process, the City of Helsinki put the Open Helsinki project out to tender. “The total IBM-based solution from Tieto emerged as the most cost-effective of all the vendors we looked at,” says Juha Alasuvanto, Project Manager at the City of Helsinki. “This was a big project with over 5,600 users, so we needed to have confidence in the team we were working with; in the end, Tieto’s expertise in IBM products convinced us.”

“The main challenges weren’t IT-related,” explains Tom Helenius, Product Manager at IBM Business Partner Tieto. “City of Helsinki officials had to teach us about the entire process of local government – from the proposal of measures to their execution – which was a big task. To meet this challenge, we organized many half-day workshops to make sure we designed a solution that would meet the City’s needs exactly.”

Building a scalable platform

The City of Helsinki engaged Tieto to implement a comprehensive case management system – Ahjo – based on IBM FileNet software. The entire decision-making process – from the drafting of a proposal through to its implementation – is now managed digitally in Ahjo, reducing paper processes.

Proposal documents are uploaded via IBM FileNet Content Manager and automatically routed to the correct departments, officials and politicians with IBM FileNet Business Process Manager and Business Process Framework. After a proposal has been drafted and a meeting agenda planned, Tieto’s eMeetings application is used to disseminate the results.

The solution enables the generation of dashboard reports, allowing city councillors and members of the public alike to see the progress of committee business updated automatically online, rather than checking intermittently by telephone.

All elected representatives have the Tieto eMeetings application available via network connections (wired, wlan or 3G) on their laptops. With the new system, all delegates bring their laptops to committee and council meetings, and use them to cast their votes online. All events and changes made during the meeting are transferred digitally, and are entered into the minutes of the meeting. Because representatives often discuss sensitive information – for example, during social services committee meetings – every councillor is issued a PIN card to access the system.

IBM Enterprise Records software is used to manage all records in the solution according to an integrated city-wide file plan. In compliance with local government requirements, records management in Ahjo covers the entire lifecycle of cases and documents, from creation to archiving or disposal.

“Training for Ahjo was done in-house, because it was as much about process-driven training as technical competence,” says Eila Ratasvuori. “It was a big change, as everything is electronic now, but eventually everyone accepted the new system.”

“The Tieto team were experienced, knowledgeable and results-driven,” says Juha Alasuvanto.

Experiencing the benefit

Today, all 35 departments in the City of Helsinki use one consolidated decision-making system. “Ahjo has definitely changed the way we work for the better,” says Eila Ratasvuori. “One of the biggest improvements has been the way we handle government documents. In the past, we had a large team of 80 registrars responsible for distributing documents to the correct officials, but thanks to the automation in Ahjo, we’ve scaled down to 21.”

All document composition, reading and editing now happens in Ahjo.

“The technical assistants’ job has changed dramatically – instead of mailing out papers to different departments, they’re now responsible for entering documents into the system electronically,” says Eila Ratasvuori. “Because documents are propagated digitally rather than as paper copies, we’ve cut the amount of printed pages we use by 40 percent, which will save the city at least €300,000 per year.

“As papers no longer travel kilometres between departments, document distribution is 24 hours faster, even for large city council meetings with 85 members. This gives elected officials a whole extra day to prepare for votes and debates.”

“In total, we have 5,000 City administrators and 600 politicians using the solution,” says Juha Alasuvanto. “There are different interfaces for different levels of users. For example, there are custom interfaces for executive level governors – such as the mayor, deputy mayor and department heads – as well as for the technical assistants.

"Ahjo helps department heads keep track of what their staff are doing. When a document is entered online, anyone can see it, which means total transparency for citizens and city officials alike.”

Looking to the future

“We’re very interested in extending the PIN security system for document signing,” says Eila Ratasvuori. “Currently, the final record of a vote has to be printed, signed and stored as a physical copy in our archives. When we implement electronic signing, we’ll be able to store the record of votes electronically instead, further reducing our dependence on paper.”

The success of the City of Helsinki’s transparent IT system has already caught the attention of other local governments. “We’ve had lots of interest in our solution from Estonia, Sweden, and of course elsewhere in Finland,” concludes Eila Ratasvuori. “We’re very satisfied with the efficiency, transparency and environmental benefits we’ve gained from the IBM Tieto solution, and we’d certainly recommend it to other local governments.”