The Nordic Digital Ecosystem Actors, Strategies, Opportunities

This report describes possibilities for Nordic digital collaboration by providing an overview of the actors in the Nordic digital eco-system and their characteristics, an analysis of the actors’ will and abilities to collaborate, and a discussion of potential business cases for such collaboration. Through a mapping of the actors in the Nordic digital eco-system, and an analysis of recent international benchmarks, the report shows that Nordic countries have a comparatively high level of digital service provision. Furthermore, the countries have highly developed specialized sectors, which deliver many complex and highquality government services. The modernization of the Nordic public sectors through digitalization seems to be backed by formal plans and political commitment. The strategic goals are basically the same and revolve around improving government services through the sharing of information resources between government agencies. The principle of “once-only” registration of relevant data, which is also embraced by the EU1 , appears to be common ground for the Nordic countries. Although the Nordic countries are high achievers, the study indicates that there are notable differences between the countries in terms of the topics they excel in. The ways in which the Nordic countries work towards achieving these goals also differ a lot. On the one hand, we find differences that can be explained by different national/political priorities. On the other hand, there are significant differences in how the countries govern their national digitalization efforts. The latter can be viewed as an obstacle to formalizing Nordic digital collaboration. The coordinating bodies of countries such as Norway and Sweden are to a lesser degree able to mandate such collaboration between agencies than their peers in countries such as Denmark, Finland and Iceland