Fireplaces and interoperability in the Data Council

Do you often think about building permits for fireplaces? Perhaps not. But Henrik Palmblad Wennergren has done so, and in a big way.

He is the Director of Digitization in Nacka municipality, an Eldorado for those who want quick decisions on fireplaces. They arrive in five minutes. That's what Henrik Palmblad Wennergren, on the right in the picture above, told us when he was a guest on TechSverige's Data Council this week.

Since 2022, municipalities have been allowed to introduce automated decisions, something that has been allowed at the state level for many years. Nacka municipality has put the issue of automated decisions in a larger context of an aging population and fewer people able to work. A municipality simply has to do more with less.

There were several lessons to learn. The focus of the work was on the soft issues - automation is not a technology issue. The municipality started with a simple case and demonstrated the effects. There was increased accessibility, capacity, legal certainty and equal treatment. An important lesson was also to implement the work together with everyone involved.

Nacka seems to be able to show the way for real municipal digitalization! Work is also underway in central government. The second guest speaker of the day was Erik Janzon, Head of Legal Affairs at the Swedish Companies Registration Office, which is investigating data interoperability between authorities. So far, Erik Janzon, pictured left, has concluded that public administration interoperability is not high enough to realize the benefits of data sharing. There is a need to share data more widely than is currently the case. At the same time, governance is underdeveloped.

The inquiry is continuing its work and hopes to come up with proposals in December that could lead to better interoperability in the public sector.

Fredrik Sand
Industrial policy expert

Photo: Bolagsverket, Liza Simonsson.