A new study from IDC shows that Sweden is among the five leading countries in Europe in egovernment implementation. The market for solutions for electronic exchange of information between government and society is growing fast, despite the economic downturn in Sweden, and the market for egovernment solutions is expected to grow from SEK 1.7 billion in 2003 to SEK 2.8 billion in 2007. There is still some way to go, however, before citizens have a single point of contact with public administrations — data needs to be standardized, applications redesigned, automatic services developed, and work procedures changed. Stage one in the adoption of egovernment — the creation of portals for citizen and business contacts with public administrations — has been achieved and is now being followed by greater integration. "Future growth in egovernment will be in automatic and integrated services, and IDC believes that in local government this market will grow more than 25% annually in the next few years," said IDC Nordic Consulting Manager Mette Ahorlu. "There are several solutions in the marketplace for local government areas such as schools, care of the elderly, and institutions, but the market is still very open." It is also very fragmented and, in contrast to other Nordic countries, there are no dominant suppliers. This makes the market very attractive to both existing players and newcomers.
Leading vendors WM-Data and TietoEnator have market shares of just 15%, with the remainder taken by a large number of vendors with low market shares. This makes the market fairly easy to address for vendors that know what is on administrations' agendas. According to IDC, the focus has been on IT and, mirroring trends in other Nordic countries, this focus will shift to organizational development. Vendors that can combine an understanding and modernization of public administration processes with services will benefit most from this development. IDC believes this will be a key differentiator in the future, even though internal efficiency does not yet feature too highly on the agenda in Sweden.
Quelle: InSourced, 11.02.2004
