Project sickness is spreading - is the answer an epidemic coordinator?

Having just returned from Almedalen Week, I can say, as my colleagues have done in previous blog posts, that digitization has been a hotly debated topic this year. Perhaps even the hottest of them all. Of course, this is something we welcome with open arms. Because digitization is not an IT issue but an issue of welfare, skills supply, sustainability, competitiveness ... etc. etc. But as great as the joy is that the subject is at least now being debated even outside the IT industry, the frustration among most people is that everything is going so (j-drans) slowly. At all the seminars I attended - my own and others' events - there was talk of how project sickness has almost taken over the digitization of the public sector. There is talk of pilot projects here and enthusiasts there, of two-year project plans and individual municipalities, county councils and authorities that are doing it themselves on a small scale. All in the absence of coordination and long-term plans for national scale-up.

So the problem is not to launch digitization projects, but to coordinate them and ensure that they are national in nature and planned over a much longer time horizon than a few years. Because digitization is not something that we "finish with", it is a constantly ongoing development that will turn much of what we know today, and many of the arrangements and systems we have established until now, upside down.

In order for Sweden not to lose momentum in the field of digitization, for us to seriously take up the fight to become the best in the world at utilizing the opportunities of digitization, we must make sure to fight the project epidemic that is currently spreading!

This can only be done through coordination and collaboration. I am convinced that the best approach would be some form of digitalization coordinator, at local and national level. Whether that is a minister with explicit responsibility for coordinating the issues in the government, a Digitization Authority or something else entirely, I leave it to those in charge to decide. But we cannot compromise on the fact that we need coordination in order to put an end to project sickness and really start a sustainable and long-term digitization of the public sector.

During Almedalen Week, we did our bit by launching the idea of a Forum for Welfare Technology with the aim of bringing together all stakeholders who are in some way affected by or have to do with IT in health and social care. All stakeholders said yes to a continuation on site. This is a form that is well proven, in which we have great faith and which can have the much-needed effect that so many have long called for - both in the short and long term, and above all at national level.