Transforming Government: Lessons from Denmark’s Digital Ready Legislation initiative
In June 2022, a UK government policy paper on its digital future called out legacy IT as a barrier to transformation, ‘we need to deal with the costly issue of legacy IT that has been allowed to build up over multiple financial cycles and is now a barrier to the delivery of great policy and services.’ In a separate report, the NAO agrees that ‘simple online citizen transactions have been prioritised for transformation and more complicated services have been left behind. In developing digital ‘front-ends’, changes to legacy systems and processes that could reduce costs are often overlooked.’
One could then assume that transforming legacy IT would allow government to delivery ‘great policies and services’. Hence the focus on back office processes, especially as many ‘front-ends’ have now been digitally transferred. However, is it not true that processes and IT, legacy or not, are there to support the delivery of policies? Would it also not be true that some of the IT and process complexities are due to policy complexities ambiguities, and rigidity? If policy is complex then the back office operations to support it would also be complex.
In the same report the NAO admits that ‘Government cannot achieve real transformation without reshaping the business of government and understanding the challenges presented by legacy systems and data.’
So along with transforming legacy IT, government needs to reshape its business. How might we do this? How can government create policies that are easy to follow and simple to deliver? Denmark might have the answer.
Digital Ready Legislation
In 2018, the Danish Government established the Digital-ready legislation initiative. ‘The goal of digital-ready legislation is to cut red tape by simplifying legislation and integrating public case processing and technology. Unnecessary and complex legislation should be simplified and new legislation should be easily understandable and digitally compatible… Essentially, the aim of digital-ready legislation is a systematic de-bureaucratisation of the Danish public sector’.
The answer is then wider than purely updating the IT and digital estate; it goes to the heart of how governments form polices. To ensure policies are simple, the Danish Agency for Digital Government focuses on the implementation impact of policies also ensuring they follow the seven principles for digital-ready legislation.
The Agency made it compulsory for departments to assess both the implementation impacts of new legislation at an early stage in the policy-making process and whether the legislation is digital-ready. Departments are asked to assess their legislation’s impact on citizens, their own organisation, data protection, and IT support, management and risk.
The seven principles for digital-ready legislation act as guidance to policy makers who need to assess their initiatives against them. The seven principles are:
1. Simple and clear rule
2. Digital communication
3. Possibility of automates case processing
4. Consistency across authorities — uniform concepts and reuse of data
5. Safe and Secure data handling
6. Use of public infrastructure
7. Prevention of fraud and errors
At a minimum the focus on end-to-end digital policy enablement encourages departments to not design policy in a vacuum but consider the real and practical implications to citizens but also to government back office.
It is no accident that Denmark consistently ranks highly in international assessments of government digitalisation.
Some Exemplars delivered through the initiative.
- Setting thresholds for agricultural reporting obligations based on objective land use data rather than revenue
- Enabling automated enforcement of urban environmental zones using license plate scanners and vehicle registries
- Allowing rapid, automated distribution of stimulus payments to eligible citizens
