Interview with Anna-Maija Karjalainen, Director General of Public Sector ICT, Ministry of Finance. In a government office in Finland, 28 employees are working alongside 18 robots to trial a new way of working. Finland is one of the world’s most advanced govtech nations, ranking sixth in the 2018 United Nation e-government survey. “We have allocated for this year 10 million Euros to encourage government agencies to use robotics, analysis or AI in daily functions,” Anna-Maija Karjalainen, Director General of Public Sector ICT at the Ministry of Finance, tells GovInsider.
National electricity transmission grid operator Fingrid’s Datahub system will play key role in retail market’s transition to a centralised information exchange Digital and artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies will feature prominently in a Finnish government-backed plan to modernise the country’s electricity network.
Read more: Finland invests in IT to upgrade electricity network
Finland’s government allocates €400m to support digital projects run by the country’s local authorities
Finland has made rapid strides to digitise a broad range of government services, with the aim of developing an advanced e-government infrastructure for an increasingly digitally smart economy.
Read more: Finnish government launches regional digitisation plan
The BOUT peer-to-peer boat ride platform enables a novel water transportation service
The Helsinki archipelago and waterfronts can be accessed from spring 2019 onwards by hiring a private boat from BOUT. The development of BOUT is supported by the Last Mile program as one of several pilot projects testing new mobility concepts in the Helsinki metropolitan area.
“The idea for BOUT came to us when we needed to arrange a ride to a Helsinki island. We couldn’t find a convenient boat service, so we decided to develop one,” says Joonas Sipari, one of the three founding partners and team of four of BOUT. BOUT is a for-profit P2P platform for on-demand boat rides. The service has been dubbed in the Finnish media as “the Uber of boats.”
Read more: FI: Helsinki Smart Mobility Development Moves Forward with On-demand Boat Rides
It hasn’t been long since we offered the Dutch government a blockchain based solution for the border control issue, as we believe that introducing real world use cases is the way towards mainstream adoption of blockchain technology.
In March 2018, Essentia attended four meetings with representatives of the Finnish MTK organization, discussing possible ways of utilizing the Essentia framework.