Striding towards better public e-services

The City of Stockholm and its citizens stand to benefit from improved collaboration with local enterprises in the creation of new public e-services, a new report has said.

Stockholm IT Region's latest report, "Stockholm: Meeting place for development of digital services", highlights the need to generate more high-quality digital services to improve efficiency and simplicity in services like school applications and licence requests.

"Municipalities are increasingly showing greater interest in developing e-services that can simplify daily life for residents and businesses," Anders Broberg, head of Stockholm IT Region's digital services project steering committee, wrote in the report's foreword.

"At the same time, Stockholm and the rest of Sweden have entrepreneurs, specialists and companies actively driving the digitalisation of services offered by municipal and other public organisations, including the opening up of the data collected within public administrations and authorities to let companies and entrepreneurs build information services," Broberg added.

The report presents a 21-point action plan for developing e-services in the Stockholm region, including proposals in the areas of leadership, user friendliness, technology and exchange of knowledge. That is in addition to more public data records being made available for entrepreneurs to use to create new services.

Earlier this year, the City of Stockholm made large amounts of digital information available for free in a bid to improve transparency and boost the number of mobile app and IT service companies.

“Stockholm is among the best cities in the world to use and develop ICT,” noted the website Open Stockholm. “In order for us to be even better, we want to offer those who want to create new apps and IT services easy access to public data that the city has collected and stored electronically.”

This article was published in collaboration between Stockholm Business Region and The Swedish Wire.