The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> Ladies and gentlemen, the program will start shortly. Please find your seats.
[PAUSE]
>> MODERATOR: Welcome to Norway. Welcome to Oslo, and welcome to the full house of this session. My name is Huran. I am with a company in our Oslo office. I have spent the last 30 years deploying digital infrastructure in the Nordic countries. And today we have a select group of panel participants who will discuss and describe Norway's journey. We'll start out with a speech and a few introductory remarks then I will work very hard to ensure that we have time for questions from you all. And towards the end, we will let the panel conclude.
Our keynote speaker is David Nurheim, specialist in the semantic Web. David has worked as an IT consultant. He has founded IT companies and for the last ten years. He has worked at Brenish, where he heads their development group.
Welcome, David. The floor is yours.
[APPLAUSE]
>> DAVID NURHEIM: Thank you, Huran.
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is David Norheim. I'm the director of business development at register center here in Norway. We are also one of the founding fathers for our digital ‑‑ several of our digital success stories in Norway, which we have the pleasure to share with you today. And before the debate in a few minutes, I will take you through a few of those.
Today we have a Norwegian digital ministry. We have a digital strategy brand‑new. We have digitalization agency. But our story starts long ago, 20 years ago, when we started with three visionary men heading three agencies.
Today Altinn is one of Norway's most important digital platforms. For interaction between businesses, government, and citizens. But the story began in the early 2000s where these three men decided that we should report to government once and use that information in all services.
This vision sparked a unique collaboration between three public agencies, the tax administration, statistics Norway, and registry center. But they didn't do it alone. And this is the key to this private partner ‑‑ private public partnership. We collaborated very closely with the accountants and public accountants, the associations to make sure that the businesses used their systems rather than just reporting to the government. These organizations represented the users and professionals that use the system every day. For businesses, this evolved into a place where you today can register a company directly from the systems. You can report annual accounts and beneficial owners directly from the business systems they have. So reducing the burdens for these services. So together we've not only built a technical solution, but we built an ecosystem of actors to the benefit of all. And to the benefit of innovation.
And this collaboration still sparks new ways of collaboration and innovation. Years later, some five, six years ago, another unique collaboration started where between the public sector and the finance industry. DSOP public‑private digital collaboration is a Norwegian initiative where public sector agencies collaborate directly with the financial sector to digitize and streamline key social processes. What's unique about this is that it's again a collaboration between leaders and not necessarily top down collaboration. It's brave leaders that decide to sit together and trust each other and there's no external funding. They carry their own costs. It's based on a portfolio approach where if you create a service that benefits someone else, the other party creates a service that benefit you. It's an initiative where ‑‑ based on trust, common infrastructure and achieving common goals.
This collaboration have resulted in large simplification for businesses and citizens. The high bar you see there is just one of the services where you automatically get information directly from the bank about taxation and salaries and from there you can automate processes in the bank through consent of the user. And this service alone has created two and a half billion euro in benefits so far.
We also have services where we push our user interface into the banks. When you start a business in Norway today, you don't go to us. You go to your bank and all the services you need is there. We just lie in the back and verify all the information and you have a registered company in seconds.
The centerpiece of all this is trust. There's trust between people. There's trust infrastructure. In this trust we need an EID system central ‑‑ it's essential to know who you're talking to. You need a platform and you need trustful national infrastructure. And Norwegian trust infrastructure has helped us to deal with crisis like the Corona crisis, combat cyber and other threats, and fraud. These days fraud is a very important collaboration we've worked together in this collaboration we talked about here to fight the threats together. Because the criminals, they are better to work without borders than we are. Norway, we consider us to be an important player in the national defense. A role in the economic infrastructure is crucial today in keeping our country up and running during peace time and war. And countries in eastern Europe have seen this in the way that digital data and infrastructure need to be in place also when you're at a situation at war.
We usually say without registrar center Norway stops. Our export for instance is depending on this.
Next step in our journey is to take our infrastructure out in the European infrastructure or the international infrastructure. And this means that we ‑‑ the strong foundation we have today with public‑private partnerships and the next generation public‑private collaboration we feed a cross border solution. With EIDAs 2.0 and digital wallets we are now expanding our trust infrastructure to the rest of Europe. This is key to opening up our digital services to ‑‑ and trust across border and between businesses and government and businesses population in general. The requirements for companies risk management and green transition entails increased burdens, and international trust infrastructure and reliable verifiable data sources along with willingness to try out new solutions as we do with this private public partnerships is key to help to maintain also the competitiveness that is drawn up in the report, for instance.
So lastly, I would just thank you for your attention and say that for us, trust is not only about the infrastructure; it's about the people that work together. In Norway this has been a very important step that we don't have this very heavy contracts to work together. We know each other, we can pick up the phone in crisis and have managed to create a good solution based on these collaborations.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much, David. That was quite interesting. I am confident that many of our panelists will have some thoughts in relation to your speech.
Let me start out with you, Oystein. You had a promising career in marketing before politics got the better on you. Conservative party for many years and also for the SIDI of Oslo as vice mayor of health and social services. For the last six years Oystein has headed up Abelia which organizes some 2,800 technology and knowledge companies in Norway. What can you tell us about Norway's digital journey?
>> OYSTEIN: Thank you. That's a small task in a couple of minutes, but let me just start to reflect a little bit and I'm sure we will dive into some various important and interesting aspects of this debate. I think I would actually like to start with saying that much is good in Norway and if you look at the digitalization of the public sector, for instance, and was also described in this presentation we just saw there, we have actually come quite far when it comes to making public services available for the population for the public digitally. We are very advanced there.
On the other hand, we will often say that when Norway is the most digitized country in the world and what we normally mean is that ‑‑ or the reason we say this is that everybody has an iPhone, but it doesn't necessarily mean that we're able to make new businesses and to really transform the economy and society based on technology for that reason. In Abelia we have been working with the question of green and digital transition. We have compared Norway with all the OCD countries over ten years. We see that we are not necessarily best in everything as we sometimes believe in this country. Both when it comes to adaptation of technology, when it comes to human capital, when it comes to entrepreneurship and innovation we actually more or less stuck in the middle in many of these areas. Why is this a problem? It's a problem because we have the least sustainable export structure actually in the OCD. I mean, it's 0 percent sustainable. We are depending on oil and gas, fish, metals, we often call it the sardine can because it consists of fish and oil and metal and it serves us well and we make a lot of money but it's not really sustainable for the future. And the world needs to make the green transition and as the world does so, the demand for our key products and services are actually fading away. So that was a bit grim introduction but ‑‑ so I think that's something I would like to follow up on there but the key word in the introductory remarks was trust and I think we have a very good foundation going through this transition when it comes to trust. We have a very high trust between the government, the companies, the business sector, and also the employees and we often talk about Norwegian or Nordic part in the three part system which I think it's an excellent foundation for doing this transition together. So I think I'll stop there and maybe we can return to some of the more technical aspects but that would be my introduction.
>> Thank you.
Next one out, Kristin helped organize the Olympic winter games before she took a number of technology and management roles at mobile operators, banks, publishing houses, hospitals, and municipalities. Today Kristin heads up research, development, innovation, and digitalization at Coes the organization for Norway's 357 municipalities and 15 regions. Welcome Kristin and please let us know what you think.
>> KRISTIN: Thank you.
I will start by saying that collaboration to develop a new digital future happens actually not between organizations as much but as between people. Oystein emphasized the importance of trust, and I think that's maybe the most unique driver that we have in Norway to reach our common goals, to develop efficient digital services. It's not only between the state and the municipalities and region; it's also between the public businesses or whatever enterprises and the private. More than I think now it's 14 years ago KS, the organization of municipalities and region actually established a program for innovative procurement, joined with a federation of Norwegian enterprises. The idea was that if you ‑‑ before you buy something with public means you have a very innovative and dialogue and what do you call based way to organize your procurement so that you don't ask what you think you need but you ask this is my needs, what solutions can you provide for us? And this is actually I would say been one of the major drivers for innovation in the public sector. It's been a big success both in the digital and green transition and it's an example of this collaborative approach and trustworthy way of kind of achieving new solutions.
KS is also the formal partner with the Norwegian partner for the digitalization of the public sector in Norway. It's very important because in Norway municipalities and region that have large responsibility compared to many other countries. Basically they're responsible for schools both primary and secondary they're responsible for primary healthcare. They're responsible for regional development, local development and of course the democratic processes that we have locally and regionally huge importance in Norway and they have actually according to low independence totally from the government, they're only ‑‑ Los are maybe today the most challenging part. We are so detail regulated that it's a problem for innovation and I think we share this challenge with the private sector.
>> MODERATOR: Kristin, thank you. Nobody can accuse our next panelist of being a disloyal employee. He spent 16 years as a consultant manager and partner at Accenture. He then moved to the savings bank where he was the CIO for almost 14 years. For the last nine years he has managed bits, which is the Norwegian banks infrastructure company. Its primary task to secure and strengthen efficient payment services and payment infrastructure in Norway.
So tell us Elvind what is on your mind.
>> ELVIND: It's extremely interesting times and we are in a phase we are now actually digitalizing the whole society together. We have been through phases where we digitalized individual tasks and companies, we digitalized the processes in the companies. In my industry, the finance industry, we have spent quite a lot of time on making it optimality between the different bank and nobody wants that up to the level that we are actually participating from the banking industry in what David presented the DS and P program that we tried to digitalize all the necessary processes to stay alive in Norway and that we digitalized between the banks, insurance companies and other national industries and a variety of public sector companies. And I think we are achieving some quite significant successes in that way. We are working together based upon trust and our ability to develop solutions is also to maintain them over years. So the day that you need a registrar it's not only made it's maintained and contains high‑quality data that can be used for a lot of purposes.
>> Elvind, thank you very much.
Before I introduce our last panelist, I would like to mention, we will open the floor for questions. There is a microphone over there. Feel free to stand up and go over to that microphone so that I Noelle have a question. For those you following us on Zoom I'm also watching the chat part of our meeting. So I can take questions from there. But before that it is a great ‑‑ Paul spent more than 20 years at Telenud global achieve legal counsel for a very long time. He also headed the Norwegian communications regulator where he initiated the fiber whole services which is possibly the most important regulatory change we've seen in telecoms since the 1990s. Today Paul is a director with ICT Norway, which is an independent member organization for technology companies. Welcome, Paul.
>> PAUL: Thank you.
I would assume you would like me to comment on the main task here on Norway's journey from infrastructure to the content. Norway has a ‑‑ also in the public sector by taking I would say bold moves and decisions in particularly some agencies in developing systems to the benefit of the public. That has been the benefit of the success also like the banks have been joining forces rather than fighting each other in making systems that's available for the public. But we are maybe good at innovation but a bit poor on the output and as time has passed, I think we can now see that we are lagging a bit behind on the ‑‑ you know, to as we was. So based on that we are a small country, scarce resources and we need to come together that is why this public‑private corporation is absolutely key for the success. And I ‑‑ let's come back to that but I also think it's a good occasion to talk about how we can improve that further. Because some of the systems they are also a bit old and they need to be replaced. That's the cost of being a first mover that some technical changes has cost over the years and is a new way of dealing and this maintaining those systems are quite costly compared to changing them and using modern digitalization thinking.
So I think it's been a great success. Norway has able to use our resources by a public that's very keen adopters of new technology as well. And in that sense being able also to export some of our solutions to others. But now what's ahead?
>> MODERATOR: Very good. Thank you, Paul.
And I think I will start with you, actually, Paul. You have seen digital journeys in a number of countries on a number of different continents in Telanun has been active in eastern Europe across Asia, Nordic countries in big markets and small markets. Can you compare and contrast Norway's digital journey with the other countries and the other markets that you have experience with?
>> PAUL: Well, I can certainly contrast. I think that's the most appealing rather than comparing because for Telemor I think the whole business idea was to bring our quite advanced technology to countries that were not that developed technologically like Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Myanmar, for instance. And using our way of doing business in those environments and actually being part of transformational of the society there. And I think the way we then did this was something that made us one of the ten biggest mobile operators in the world by using local knowledge and local insight combining that with our technological insight and knowledge.
So I think the story behind that was that the local authorities, they really invited and were very positive have a strong message to us that they were asked to do this in a decent way, band way and helped us along as well as building out the national network is a quite complex issue with many controversials coming along as well, but to be part of such a journey and noticing the transformational affect it had on the countries is amazing. So I think then we're able to use the best of our knowledge combined with local insights to achieve that.
>> Exactly.
Kristin? Oystein go ahead.
>> OYSTEIN: Sorry for jumping in, but I wanted to expand a little bit on the perspective when it comes again to the roles of the private and the public sector in developing the digital infrastructure and so on, I think we have seen in Norway that actually it's possible to have as the private players literally play an important role in building the infrastructure, securing broadband and Internet to the most remote areas actually even though we still have some few percentages left I think we have been very successful in that. And actually the government hasn't had to spend that much money on that. It's been taken to a large extent care of by the market.
>> And then, of course, the government has come in with some subsidies and support where needed. I think this is one example of how we can actually work well together.
On the other hand, I think it's fair to say in a country where GDP a 60 percent public sector we have a large public sector and maybe the public domain spreads a little bit too wide sometimes. As part of this discussion I think we need to look at how can we best define the roles of the government and the public sector and what are the roles of the private sector?
>> MODERATOR: I think you're making an important point, and in connection with that, you know, Kristin, I believe it was the old president of the United States Ronald Regan, he said the nine most terrifying words in the English language is I'm from the government and I'm here to help. And, you know, as Norwegians I think we don't always get the joke in a sense most we like the government. They teach us to read and write, they help us out when we're sick. But let me ask you: What, if anything, do you think that the government should stop doing or that the government should do less of?
>> KRISTIN: Where should I start? I could say something I would like less of and some things I would like more of. It's a dance, a dance of balances. I think one of the challenges in Norway is that the state governance is very sectorized, and we are in a situation today where you're actually competing for resources for people and for money. And the way where ‑‑ when you govern a sector like the educational sector or the health sector to secure that resources go to your goals is to regulate, enforce that kind of loss, that kind of bind the municipal sector to spend the resources exactly in this domain. And the result is that we are overregulated and that the local authorities regional authorities are only able to abide around 80 percent of the loss and regulations that they're actually bound by. It's simply not enough people and quite often these laws are contradictory. So then you sit there which law is more important in this case? You will get someone come and checking you if you did your job anyways. So I would like more trust from the state to the local authorities so they are actually able to see these are my citizens. What do I think is most important in this case and use the resources accordingly. So that's the one thing. I would like less regulations and more trust.
Secondly, I would like the State to work more together across these sectors because we see that by making solutions digitally that are actually relevant for this sector only you complicate the world and it's ‑‑ the complexity is increased and many solutions that are quite equal that are sold many times instead of once. So that's one more important thing I would like more of. I would like more cooperation through these state sectors. I think it's an awareness. It's a common knowledge, but it's a very hard to transform the traditional way of governing. Yes, us a less of thinking you can fit in an office centrally in Norway and design a solution that's going to work all over the country, all over the ‑‑ it doesn't work that way. You need to be close enough to where things actually happen and be aware of the real problems and so we are very happy for the collaboration. We actually have with the state and the national authorities through our organization because it's helped bringing us closer together so we can bring real world people into how to make solutions that actually work.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much.
I would like to let Katrina know that we have received your question over Zoom. We will get to it in a few minutes.
Also, if you have questions, please feel free to go up to the microphone and I will give you the word.
But before that, Elvind your turn.
>> Elvind: I think we're having quite a interesting structure between what should do in private versus public sector. We have a very clear distinguishing between the commercial arena player or being a provider of infrastructure. I'm lead ago company called bits, and nobody has probably heard of that company outside our industry. But we are providing innovation payment infrastructure and we are a noncommercial company which means that we are not making a big profit on having a monopoly over infrastructure. So the ability to compete in Norway as a bank is based on you get permission from the FSA to operate in Norway and then you can participate in infrastructure. And it's noncommercial. I think that's key for a nation to be very clear on what is competitive arena what is infrastructure arena and who's actually running the infrastructure it must have been done in a decent way so that you don't get a huge economic loss of deficit on a huge profit on the infrastructure part of the digital highway.
>> Thank you, Elvind.
David, we have received a question over our Zoom channel. It's from Katrina. I'm into the going to try to pronounce her last name but a legal consultant working on the UNIDROIT project. She would like to address a question to Mr. David Norheim: Given the advanced level of digitalization in Norway and the importance of trust that you highlighted, could you please elaborate more on your journey with EIDAS2.0 and the European business wallet? What have been the main challenges in implementing these solutions and what are the best practice that you could share by now?
>> MODERATOR: Yes. Quite a detailed question.
First of all, Norway was very early on recognizes this infrastructure of Eidas 2.0 with wallets and we participated in the EU large scale pilot project called EVC, European wallet consortium where together with our Nordic partners and others in Europe, we started working on a few scenarios, a few pilots, including creating a branch across countries. So we already have over a couple years now experience with piloting.
And then we also in ‑‑ within Norway, we have been having quite a use cases over this sector problem mentioned here that we aren't able to solve fully because of the need for changes in regulation. So we also identified quite a few national project where we have a large potential using these technologies. So we also worked with municipalities at Oslo municipality ‑‑ commune. We've seen through these pilots we already got a lot of experience, and not we are also entering the we build consortium, which is an even larger consortium including also digitalization agency Norway and others, which allows us to see these things together. Our challenges is partly that we already have a well functioning EID infrastructure today. So we need to figure out how to do that in the future. So we need a process for that, that which is going on. But we also have challenges with seeing wallets, the two wallets, the personal ID and the business ID together and making sure that these things together in the regulation that comes from the Europe, and being EAA member we also have a challenge we may be lagging a little bit behind the rest of Europe, which may make Norway fall behind as in competition as well. So there's a few challenge that we are very much aware of with and talking with several ministries about these issues.
>> Thank you, David. I have a follow‑up question for you as well, but first Paul.
>> PAUL: Yeah, thank you. Let me also dive a bit into not exactly that question but the challenge here you know how to take this further. Because I think when you're building a system across the state for the inhabitants, it's important that you think of having a system that can work across different sectors. And transport data and information across sectors. This is also our first disadvantage we have in Norway that we haven't been able to build such a system because of different sectors they have built their kind of own systems. So it's a very violate point I think for those who's now considering how to do this that take into account how to make something across, because as Kristin says it's vital that the different sectors cooperate in order to make it efficient for inhabitants.
The second point I would like to address in Norway we are very lucky. We have a wealthy state which also means that we have a big public sector. Like 60 percent of the mainland economy is GDP is in public sector and a third of all employees in Norway work in public sector. That means that we need to find the good balance on having the private sector working together with the public sector in these issues. While there's a huge amount of resources in the public, they also need to then address the innovation and use the force of the private sector to the best extent.
I think we ‑‑ nowadays we are looking ‑‑ struggling a little bit with balance to take it further so we're not like behind on innovation as you said.
Thank you.
>> Thank you, Paul.
David, you and several other panelists have underlined the importance of trust when going on a digital journey. And I can kind of see, you know, Norway's a small country, you know, most of the time, you know, your grandfather ran a farm in the same valley as my grandfather or, you know, there is intuitively ‑‑ often there is a connection. My question to you, maybe to Elvind and the rest of you, do you scale trust and how can you do this in larger markets.
>> DAVID NURHEIM: It's a very interesting one. I'll try to answer as a politician saying what I want to say rather than answer your own question in a way. But what you learn from us. I think it's not about copying our solutions as to try to copy the approach. We have ‑‑ I think one of the unfair advantages is that we have a trust and braveness of some leaders. I think that's very important. Some of the leaders of the agencies here are brave enough.
The other thing is that we have trust for sources, data sources. We have a registry transition, central registry here in Norway which with process that is make them high quality both in the public sector and in the private sector. And there's a Norwegian word called Outsept which is hard to translate but gives each other leeway so that you don't necessarily end up with a solution here and there but you know that the other person is going to work on trying to solve that problem. You will face challenges, but if you give them enough leeway, you will overcome them as well as we've seen in our collaboration and with the finance industry.
The other one is you need to not be too afraid of touching the private sector. I think that's something that we see different from country to country that some are very reluctant in talking directly to the private sector that the actual system providers, but talking through associations pinning them out and then talk directly to them has been a great success for us.
The last I want to say is knowing your own limitations. There was talk about competencies here. I will say resources and innovation, we ‑‑ though my agency got a fifth place or fourth, I don't remember right now, the place in the Norwegian innovation scale last year, we know our limitations. We need to create services that others can invade on top of because we will not be fast enough to create the next good services. And that's a limitation you have to accept and then find a way to give that ‑‑ give data and services to others. So that's a few points.
>> Thank you, David.
Kristin, go ahead.
>> KRISTIN: I think one thing that we have a tradition for and that we have developed even more of the later years is arenas, establishing arenas for collaboration and dialogue, meeting places both between different state‑owned organizations and the municipalities but also between us as public entities and the private sector.
Our organization has established a company that's kind of mutually run by all Norwegian municipalities and region for common digital solutions. And one of the governance main points is that this company actually should strive for to drive innovation also in the private sector. So always kind of balance, think what can actually the private companies do for us, the vendors and what do we need? Is there anything we need to do you are ourselves or how can we use the market? This is something we work with all the tile and we have arenas for dialogue how can we solve this? I mentioned previously this national program for innovative procurement as an example. All these arenas where we talk together instead of how to solve this for the common good instead of talking about each other behind the backs and criticizing. I think this is very important and it's kind of I think it's something other countries can learn from and this procurement program has actually been copied by Denmark. We need this. We do the same thing and I think more countries can learn from this.
>> Very good. Oystein.
>> OYSTEIN: I wanted to applaud what Christine is just saying. It's very important that the public sector understands the power it has when it comes to actually being an innovation muscle and using the power of procurement to actually look for new solutions not only buying or otherring the old things the same red bus but actually describing a need for transportation and how can it be solved? Public sector annual procurement of more than 700 billion. It's amazing. This has to be used much stronger to actually build a home market. With a small economy, a small country, all the tech companies are trying to go abroad and find new markets. They will often be asked have you sold your product in Norway and if the answer is no, the Norwegian health services did their own thing, they don't want our product then you have a problem. So I think this is also a very important point.
>> Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a brave member of the audience. Francis. Who has a question. Welcome to us Francis and please state who you are and what your question is.
>> Francis: My name is Francis and I work for the same agency. David is my manager. It's a complicated question so I'm not expecting an immediate answer but I think you touched on it in the last point that we should understand the nature of public sector because the public sector is both governance or what we call ‑‑ at different levels and there are government owned institutions. Thank you. Government owned institutions like hospitals, schools, and there are private schools as well and this complicates the picture. Then you have private sector which is for profit, there's nonprofit and voluntary sectors as well. So my question is: How do we tackle the value creating logic? How do is value created seems to be the trick to distinguish and that's where I've seen from participating in these projects we've done in the public sector it is going after value that you can get this collaboration to work. So the question is: How do you communicate this in ‑‑ this complex situation in an easy way?
>> Thank you, Francis.
Oh, everybody. I went first and then Oystein.
>> Hello, Francis. In the DESA program that David presented we have done quite a lot of work on identifying the value and it's actually quite simple because it's sitting down with a stopwatch and seeing the processes we are trying to digitalize and trying to find where are we saving time? Where are we increasing quality? Where are we reducing fraud and scam and try to calculate as precise as we can the value. The clue then is how do we split the value in a cooperation between David's department and my industry. And then getting back to something we tried in this program to create a portfolio. If you think under this project which is giving value to me I can approach it like use value to David and David can find a project that gives value to Kristin and if you can balance this in a fair way and try to be ‑‑ David you used the word (Norwegian) try to be with each other then we can try to create projects with less lawyer work and more value creation. At least that's how we've done it in the DESA program. It's worth looking into.
>> Very good. Oystein.
>> OYSTEIN: As you said it's a big and complicated question and I want to jump in a little bit from my sort of political experience saying that obviously to find the balance between the public and private players and sectors. It's obviously also a political question. There will be different emphasis and opinions on how much should be. Because very correctly distinguish between the regulatory role of the government and then the service provision and providing services and of course in the latter area it's a political question how much should be produced by the government agencies and local agencies and vice versa and how much should be done with the private sector. I think it's very important to have this debate and to have this also focus on okay but in any case what should the government do when it comes to provide ago platform, a basis for building services and solutions that can be built by public agencies but also by the private sector and preferably understandably from my perspective I think more should be done also by the private sector. I don't see any reason why public companies should develop solutions for infrastructure like, you know, and transportation whatever that can be easily be done by the market but I mean this is a debate and I think it's important to keep that alive.
>> Thank you. I'll let Paul comment.
>> PAUL: Briefly I think it's have a very important and interesting question because you talk about the value creation and to me it's then important to address the different values we're talking about. To me for the public services it's about producing services for the public which are efficient and they are easy to use and that cater for the needs. That's the core role of the public sector and to me then it's not having a big IT department as part of that but these services are as good as they should be for the public and it's very hard for each sector or each agency to maintain a staff of IT personnel that can keep up with the development in the markets. So it's ‑‑ to me it says itself it is not sufficient and best way of spending the public money that you have development in each sector of their systems and so on. So that's where the public‑private partnership comes into play and can really be the best solution.
>> Paul, thank you very much.
We have another brave member of the audience who would like to ask us a question. Please go up to the microphone, tell us who you are and your question.
>> Good afternoon. Thank you for all your insights on presentations. My name is Vanessa Ramos and I'm here representing ‑‑ as a citizen, but as well I have been supporting a project that is inter reg, European Union's interregional corporation and a project between greater Copenhagen going out to the west coast and it extends to Vikerun around Oslo. I have been living in the Nordics for 20 years. Eighteen years in Sweden so I know the digital journey from the Swedish perspective and since two years ago in Norway. So I'll be like a newcomer learning and the tax administration and I saw an example how it works. My question is related to, aspect that is interoperability and according to the European interoperability framework it has four layers it could be one the technical the legal and the organizational. And one of the most challenges that in interoperability is the organizational layer how to in the silos among others municipalities. My first question will be: What could the private sector help aiding to Satish Babu ‑‑ to have tailoring with business processes helping the same citizen, the same individual or the same business across the sectors? So it's perhaps like a more than a question just at how could this ‑‑ how could the private sector help the public sector ensuring they are doing all the processes for the same person was the first question.
The second one if it's any example what is the state of art in the healthcare sector to have data portability across the country in Norway? Or for the welfare of children. As a former social worker I have really my heart into the wealth of families and children. Is it any example of ‑‑ or state of art that the same person can be traveling across the country and having its data. Thank you.
>> Thank you, Vanessa.
I think Kristin you've done some heavy lifting within the electronic health. Could you help us a little bit maybe describing the status of those type of services?
>> KRISTIN: I had a bit of problem of actually getting the key sense of the question. I can talk a lot about healthcare and how you cooperate between the private and public sector there. I would say also regarding healthcare its development towards more active use of private companies. If this was kind of the key of your question and use technology actively and also actually support from the state one municipality develop and try out a solution it is spread to other municipalities for the same thing. But I must ‑‑ if you have something that was really important to ‑‑ I had a problem with the sound so I couldn't hear.
>> That's fine. Thank you, Kristin. I'll give ‑‑ I'll tell you what, we have four minutes left. That means one minute for each of you. I suggest we start with David.
>> I'll spend those on trying to answer a little bit the question and I would like to follow up with you later as well.
Casey mentioned this about ‑‑ I think that's an important ‑‑ we have both private public arenas and we have public arenas where we talk together between agencies and also between the municipalities level and the state level and that's one start. These interoperability framework also talks what we call services that hangs together, life events or that's ‑‑ in Norway we identified seven of these that we tried to solve and which means that you need to sit together to solve the problem, you cannot do it yourself and with the stories have kind of delegated those responsibilities down to one or more state organizations and then we're forced to sit together to think of how to solve that problem. And one very ‑‑ it would be great to have a video of this and one great service that would announce two years ‑‑ two weeks ago was how to ‑‑ when the person in your family dies, how is that all that paperwork handled? Put into a motion now and that spans everyone here. And that's ‑‑ I think that you can identify this very complex solutions and find ways of working together. I think that's key. Thank you.
>> I would like to spend my last minute ‑‑ Norway has had a painful journey on sharing health information. We have reached a small portal with some information and the big problem is GDPR because it's extremely hard to share that kind of personal information between digital legal entities unfortunately. It's not a technical problem.
>> I would like to spend the last minute commenting on this and maybe answering your question better because it's ‑‑ yes, it's a regulatory problem. It's about information that you give information to maybe to a doctor but the doctor doesn't share it on ‑‑ when you need to have assistance from others in the value chain of public health. And it's also it's regulatory but it's also result of this fragmentation of government where you think that I have my responsibility and I know we need to kind of protect information that I have instead of thinking, no, this data, this information belongs to the citizen and this is a big challenge actually only last week the health government they came with a new law that will be discussed in parliament in the fall than the new parliament and that opens up and actually says that you have to share the information with others it's very special reasons that you need to protect it. I think this can be very important first step to make health services better and that we can use data and share health information in a proper way.
>> It's Kristin. Oystein briefly.
>> Point number one, it's often said that the U.S. innovates and Europe regulates. I'm glad there is a focus on this now and it also goes for Norway we need to cut some of the regulation that hinders regulation. From our transition barometer, we need the digitalization needs people and especially Norway we have a very big competence gap. So we need to educate more in this area. We need to upscale more in our businesses and organizations. We need to include better and we also need to welcome international talent to Norway. I think this is very important. My last point is trust for innovation. I think we have an advantage if we have a trust between the public and private sector and also between the employers and employees. If the employee doesn't believe that as soon as I use AI I will lose my job and ‑‑ then there is a benefits for the digitalization going forward. Thank you.
>> Paul.
>> Thank you. I also think I'll stick to three points. The first being for success I think it's imperative that you think across sectors and holistic systems you implement and the second is to have a clear political agenda and a clear political will to do so because it requires this move to move ahead to really raise the status. And thirdly, then a switch comes as part of it I think it's important that the private and public sector work together in a way that allows the private sector to make money and the public to focus on their core businesses but they need to do it in a way that creates a sustainable solution of a role.
>> Thank you very much. Thank you all. Thank you for very good questions. We are two minutes above time. I think it was well worth it. Let's give ourselves a hand.
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