The licensing and supervision project

Goals and results

The target of the licencing and supervision project is to reform licencing and supervision practices by harnessing the opportunities offered by digitalisation. The objective is to develop client-oriented practices and identify licensing and supervision packages that meet clients’ needs, as well as to integrate the related service and handling processes in a client-oriented way. The aim is to shift from an agency-oriented approach to a client-oriented service experience and client promise, instead of the current mainly public authority-specific perspective on clients and tasks. The project aims to facilitate and ease the clients’ daily lives by identifying and dismantling unnecessary and overlapping processes and services, while at the same time making authorities’ activities and processes more effective and integrated. This involves an extensive and significant change in the authorities’ activities and approach; the focus will be shifted to the clients and their needs and to information and its efficient harnessing.
Client-oriented licensing and supervision service packages will be achieved by:
• Identifying and describing the service packages created based on clients’ needs and the client-oriented efficient service paths and chains
• Providing services across administrative and organisational boundaries
• Focusing on information: real-time information follows the client
• Creating a one-stop-shop model for a digital services layer, as well as all-channel support services for users
• Harnessing analytics, automation and artificial intelligence

Starting points

The licensing and supervision project is part of the key project package “Public services will be digitalised” of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s Government Programme. The target is to redesign public services in a user-oriented way and make them primarily digital. The Government Programme emphasises the need to digitalise public services and request information only once.
In the summer of 2015, the Government received more than forty (43) replies to its request for suggestions on the digitalisation of its licensing, notification and supervision activities. A significant proportion of the suggestions described client-oriented reformation of the services from an individual public agency’s point of view, although several authorities regulate clients’ activities simultaneously.
The project was preceded by two preliminary surveys, the latter of which involved testing a shared client-oriented development model for a modification project at a large industrial plant and the organisation of the events involved. These preliminary surveys found that although advances have been made in the accessibility of the services online, and in the digitalisation of the services and administration, there are still differences in the sophistication of the online services offered, with different administrative levels working in isolation, and with development work, processes and services still mainly specific to and oriented towards the authorities.
The project’s target is to identify client-oriented service packages that cross administrative and agency boundaries and to create an integrated and streamlined description of them. Central to the project are the service packages created based on clients’ needs and the client-oriented efficient service paths and chains in which regional and agency boundaries are invisible to the client.
Service design projects also help to identify and pick out for examination the legislative amendments required for or enabled by the pursued change, as well as the opportunities to shift from licensing to notification procedure.
The project also implements a one-stop-shop model for a services layer that enables digital services and all-channel support services. This model is equipped with functionalities that support joint use and the utilisation and sharing of information.