Digital Government Review of Sweden by OECD

Author:OECD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: agriculture/science/governance
Publisher: OECD Publishing
Published: 2019-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

In the second half of 2017, the Swedish government created an expert group on IT investments as an effort to guide investments on ICT projects, but this body plays an advisory role as it does not count on enforcement powers nor policy levers to steer investments in public sector digitalisation. It is also intended to provide advice only for those projects with a threshold of or superior to SEK 20 million (approximately EUR 2 million). This function is now part of the DIGG.

Human capital

The effective capacity for analysis, preparation and implementation of digital government decisions within the Ministry of Finance increased from 3 to 15 public officials between 2015 and 2017.5 The DIGG, for its part, is expected to reach a workforce of 70 or more public officials in its first years of operation (Swedish Government, 2018).

For perspective, when launched in 2011, the UK government’s Digital Service had a workforce of 173 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff, which increased to 653 in 2015-16, and was expected to reach a peak of 911 staff by 2016-17, as per budgeted FTE figures. Staff numbers were expected to decrease to 780 from its peak by 2019-20 (UK National Audit Office, 2017). In Uruguay, AGENSIC, the agency in charge of the digital agenda, had a staff of roughly 250 employees by March 2016 (AGESIC, 2016). Norway’s E-government agency (Difi) has a total of 300 employees distributed between Oslo and the municipality of Leikanger (Difi, 2018).

Additionally, the location of the DIGG outside Stockholm (in the city of Sundsvall) will require special efforts to ensure that its mandate, working methods, culture and job profiles are interesting enough to attract, and retain, a skilled workforce, particularly in light of the thriving digitally related start-up ecosystem in Sweden. The contribution of the agency will be determined by the availability of a workforce of the right size, but also by the talent and skills available among these human resources. They should be able to provide technical and strategic support to effectively communicate key messages at all levels (from technicians to managers and politicians), and deliver policy goals.

In a broader sense, it is necessary to scale up skills and competencies at the individual level in order to build up the overall competences of the agency to enable it to keep up with the promises and high expectations, to fulfil its mandate, and support the accomplishment of the goals of the digital government agenda. Additionally, connecting the demand, or need, for specific skills within the agency with the goals of the digital government agenda will be fundamental to achieve these objectives.

It would be advisable, for instance, to maintain an agile approach to enable the agency to identify what skills are required, build these skills in house or attract them if needed.

For instance, in Chile, the creation of the GovLab (Laboratorio de Gobierno, a body originally located within the Chilean Economic Development Agency, Ministry of Economy) followed a design thinking approach to determine the skills needed inside by the Lab in line with the achievement of specific policy goals and its mandate.

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