> Well digitalization in Denmark is an absolute train wreck of ill thought out decisions.
Yes, and it’s also competing with Estonia at being the best in the world.
One of the things that burned me out was actually the poor decision making, from my technical point of view mind you. I’ll simplify what I mean by a made up example of a platform selection process. Your organisation needs a headless CMS, your external consultants tells you this, your tech staff tells you this and even your friends from competitors that you network with privately tell you this. The issue is that your company strategy is to rely as little on internal IT resources as possible, and any available headless CMS (because you can’t outhouse the data) requires technical talent. So what do you do? Well, you pick something else, like Wordpress, the Microsoft powerplatform or similar, and you do fine. The solution is shit technically, but it also works good enough while achieving its primary strategic goal within your organisation.
Public sector digitalisation is that, except a billion times more complicated and with the added bonus of having changing political leadership. For a few years we had a designated minister in Sophie Løhde, who setup a branch of the digitalisation ministry to build a cross sector national enterprise architecture inspired by the one they run in the municipalities (KL) called rammearkitekturen. The group had an extreme amount of talent and improved on the 20 years of KL work so much it was like the whole thing went from the stoneage to the spaceage in less than a year. Then Sophie Lødhe got a different job, the task force was disbanded and everything related to governance went back to the municipalities (KL and KOMBIT) whom through out the process had suffered from an extreme inability to kill their darlings.
I mean, that’s just a glimpse of it, but you don’t have to work with other European countries for very long until you relive just how awesome digitalisation is in Denmark by comparison. Part of my current job is dealing with the fact that FTP is still a very common data transfer channel in Germany and France, and I didn’t miss that S in SFTP, because that’s something even massive tech companies that shall remain unnamed hadn’t heard about until I asked them why it wasn’t encrypted.