Digitalising Finnish government: interview with Anni Leppänen of D9 Team
Anni Leppänen recently joined the D9 team, the digitalisation consulting team situated in State Treasury of Finland (Valtiokonttori) as “Lead Experimentalist” (kokeilukehittämisen asiantuntija in Finnish). I have had the privilege to get to know Anni as a student at Design for Government, a master’s level advanced studio course I cofounded under Creative Sustainability master’s programme at Aalto University. I was so excited to hear that D9 just started operating so I wanted to find out all about it. On a sunny afternoon, I sat down with Anni over a coffee (and some food) at the fantastic El Fant in Helsinki city centre. Below is the summary of my discussion with Anni.
Seungho Park-Lee So, how did it all get started?
Anni Leppänen (AL) There was general election in 2015, and the new parliament was formed. Digitalisation was a cross-cutting theme in the new government programme. Minister of Local Government and Public Reforms, Anu Vehviläinen, is the minister in charge for advancing the government’s digitalisation agenda. State Treasury conducted two research projects, the first of which looked into opportunities for digitalisation by performing interviews in 48 government agencies, yielding a total of 1,024 development suggestions. The second one looked into the estimated impact and savings on 34 selected actions for central government. The action entities have been grouped into seven subject areas. Following the research papers, the Ministry of Finance has started a project called SuomiDigi and the D9 team was formed in the State Treasury.
SPL How do those two differ?
AL Suomidigi is an online platform that supports civil servants working with digitalisation in the public sector. Currently in its Beta version, the platform gives advices on digitalisation of government services and its tools include, among other things, a playbook with guidance for each step in a digitalisation project. Whereas Suomidigi supports a virtual community, D9 team is in a way its analogue version supporting real people face to face. We are called in by the public servants in different parts of the central governments, and we go in and help with their specific needs. The official name in Finnish, “Digitalisaation tuki D9”, translates into “Support for Digitalisation D9” in English. So that tells.
SPL The fact that SuomiDigi is currently beta shows that the government is using a more agile development method.
AL Yeah. One of the civil servants behind Suomidigi, Councellor Aleksi Kopponen, has background in the start-up world. I am also very impressed by the agile and iterative approach.
SPL Where does the name D9 come from?
AL: Actually the name “D9” represents the government’s principles for digitalisation, that includes customer-orientation, openness, ease of use, reduced hassle and so on. So our team is the consulting and support wing for carrying out digitalisation in central governments that follows D9 principles.
SPL That reminds of the Martha Lane Fox’s manifesto for UK government’s digitalisation and Design Principles of GDS. I am so happy to see that the government is taking a holistic approach to this challenge. So what is your role there, and who else is there?
AL We are currently seven people, including a chief enterprise architect, chief digital officer, service designers, and programme directors. My position reads roughly “experimentalist” in English, which means that I help public sector organisations and projects to experiment and try out different ways to achieve user centred digitalisation. Most of my practical work is service design. But we are not 100% settled yet. The chief digital officer, Nina Nissilä, started in December 2016, and I and my colleagues started less than 4 months back. The plan is that we build our own agenda and will evolve our role over time.
SPL Great. I will definitely get back to you guys in a year or so to check back on your progress. But is there any concrete project that you started consulting for?
AL There are few. In one project that is about to start, we have several government agencies implementing a digital-first citizen inbox, and we at D9 are helping them to adopt the concept, technology and make the service user-centred. The other is actually in line with the project we’ve done for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry two years ago in Design for Government course, which was to reduce bureaucracy for civil servants and primary producers. The then client to Design for Government, Päivi Virtanen has been successful to get this agenda farther, and we are so excited about it.
SPL That is a wonderful news for the primary producers, but also for our course.
AL It really is. I really appreciated the time in the course, because back then we could spend much time on empathic design research, you know, visiting the farms, observing how they work, interviewing farmers as well as the public servants that engages with this line of work. Working on projects at D9 and the government is fast-paced and we have less time to conduct field work, although we still get to do it.
SPL Do you feel there is enough awareness in the government about how important ethnographic approaches are?
AL Yeah, many of the public servants I’ve met definitely understand it. Many talk about those methods in their everyday work, which is very encouraging. But I think design is still fairly new to the public sector. So, one of our goals at D9 is to demonstrate and explain how design can help develop better services and a more human centred-public sector.
SPL That is great. Because the efficacy of design and especially that of human centred and empathic design methods are not so easy to grasp in couple of hours of workshops.
AL Exactly, and that’s why I am so excited to join this team. We hope we can guide the digitalisation projects in the public sector towards real commitment in user centred focus.
SPL I am so excited about you joining the team, and I can’t wait to see the progress you’ll make for Finnish government. Thank you so much for your time today.
AL Thank you, too!
This post was originally written in Korean for DesignPress, a joint venture between Monthly Design magazine and a popular portal & search engine, Naver.
