Comment by Quothling
14 hours ago
As someone who spend a decade in the Danish public sector, among other things working in groups on national architecture. I'd say that we reap what we sow. IT and digitalisation is not taken very serious in our public sector. In most places it's placed under something, and until recently it didn't have it's own ministry. Right now it's even a shared ministry, and there is little focus on cyber security. What has arrived in recent years is solely based on the thread of hybrid attacks from Russia.
Compare this to the ministry of transportation, which has full resources. This is despite the fact that most people in this country spend less time commuting than they do working on a computer. Not that transportation isn't important, but maybe digitalisation is as well?
My personal CPR has been leaked a couple of times though. Hilariously the first time it was leaked when a couple of unencrypted laptops were stolen from the biggest IT union in the country. We have a system in place where you can flag your CPR as having been leaked. Though I suppose now we might as well consider every one of them to be leaked. In theory a CPR on it's own was never meant to give any sort of authority or access, but again, this wasn't the practice in a lot of place. So I guess this leak may be a blessing in disguise in that sense as well, as it'll highten security because of broken trust.
> IT and digitalisation is not taken very serious in our public sector.
I think I get what you are trying to say, but just for other people reading this: Denmark is one of the "best" / advanced countries when it comes to IT and digitalisation in public sector in Europe.
Maybe 10 years ago, but other nations have caught up. Italy has their Sistema di Interscambio. Germany and France have taken digital sovereignty serious. Spain is big on open source (and ruby for some reason). Estonia has been miles ahead for more than 10 years. It's true that we have some ease of use systems compared to most of Europe, but we also have a lot of horror stories.
That being said it's not like us being shit at cyber security doesn't mean other countries aren't also shit. Look at Australia getting hacked by AI. I know it's all the rage to blame OpenAI, but really, shouldn't Australia count itself fortunate it wasn't an enemy nation state? Or that their lacking security got exposed before it was.
You're conflating two different things here. What Denmarks excels at it implementing public IT solutions that makes processes smoother, like patient records, medical perscriptions, digital signature, a nation-wide digital identity, things like that. Digital sovereignty isn't part of this, and Denmark isn't particularly good at it, nor is it really valued that highly. Same for cyber security, I'd say that it's down to dumb luck that it's not worse. There is a city, Randers, they can't send email to the domain anders.dk (Anders being a pretty normal Danish name). Why? Because the butterfingered public employees in Randers could stop sending personal information about citizen to anders.dk, which has a catch-all email. They simply forgot the "r". The problem is the lax attitude to emailing sensitive information, probably via a Microsoft run Exchange server, but rather than fixing that, they just blocked the anders.dk domain.
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Mhh, I don't know. In Germany they proudly proclaimed their BAföG / Student loans (SU in Denmark) is now digital. But what was digital was just the client side, on the government agency side they still would print out the applications. And because they where used to people sending in paper, they had to hire more people to help with the printing. AHHHHH. That is the state of German digitalisation.
There are things I wish I could change in Denmark, mainly the power sockets and number system (Base 20 what the heck?) but Denmark is on a good course when it comes to IT understanding. Both the broader society and government implementations.
Yes yes, Estonia is better. But Denmark is still doing good.
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Another Dane here, and that is absolutely not true. Where's your source to back up this claim? (I'll show you mine if you show me yours)
> Where's your source to back up this claim?
Feel. Having lived in Denmark and Germany. And working for the public sector.
MitID is just chefs kiss how many other countries can you log in to your bank, student loan, and local municipality with the same sso. Country wide app for local transportation tickets of different types. EPJ / Elektronisk Patient Journal has it's fault, but compared to other countries[2] yet again not that bad.
Shit man, even something simple has going to the doctor for blood tests. I think you can get the results on the same day via app. Maybe next day. In Germany[1] you have to wait a few days, then the Dr. calls you with the results and then you can ask him if he can mail it to you.
What in Denmark actually requires you to get physically to the municipality? Weddings? Even divorces work online. Compare that to Germany, Austria, Italy etc.
Why do you think Denmark is not one of the leading countries in digitalization?
Edit: Just looked at some real benchmarks. One from EU where they put DK at 7th out of EU27 https://composite-indicators.jrc.ec.europa.eu/explorer/indic... And one UN E-Government Survey from 2024 where they rank first. https://publicadministration.un.org/egovkb/en-us/Reports/UN-... (I just looked at an overview)
I can't say how accurate these lists are. But they match my observations. Nordics lead.
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Can't speak for the Danish govt in general, but you should look up the history of the property tax scandal and the projects that tried to fix it. I was part of the third attempt to rectify the problem at SKAT.
Or how there still are over 200 people working fulltime on the corona mink .. "event"
That said, compared to other countries the tax / SKAT is also quite decent.