Comment by Mashimo
13 hours ago
> 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.
I don't think I'm combining different things. I think the lack of focus on digital sovereignty is just another symptom of a public sector which still doesn't prioritises IT. Which I think follows my original post about our CPR system reaping what it had sown. I don't think you are wrong, but I think as far as my point on taking digitalisation serious, which I think is a required part of a mature public sector, I think all these lacking areas tell the story of a public sector which used to be the best in the world, but has been far too complacent.
As far as Randers cyber security goes. I imagine it'd be "fun" to do an right of access to documents, on the amount of unique visits their Microsoft Defender has registered to chatgpt.com and claude.ai.
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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.
Doing well has two dimensions (at least). One is the degree of digitalization, and here I think youre right, Denmark is doing well. The other dimension is security, and here Denmark is not doing so well.
As all security professionals know, people dont care about security, until they are hurt, and often even after that. Lost privacy doesnt hurt if you dont think too much about it.
What we are also seeing is that governments/administrations dont care about security (with exceptions). They really want to go ahead in the digitalization dimension, but not so much in the security dimension.
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.
> And working for the public sector.
Ah - there we go..
Meanwhile living in Denmark we are not even able to get results for blood panels from our 14 year old daughter cause "the system was not made for it". You know I'd much rather have it in the mail than not at all.
Even so, we tried to get a MitID for her so hopefully she could log in to see them. How do we do that you ask? Meet up physically. Did they fuck it up the first time? Sure, but luckily only a week later we were able to get a time hoping we'd now be able to get access to her blood panels. Nope. Logging in with her MitID says she is not old enough to see her blood panels. How long has it been like this? More than 5 years.. But luckily a law was passed in 2023 to do something about it.. Has it happened yet? No, but it doesn't matter.. She'll be 15 before it's implemented anyway.
I could go on with similar stories from almost every system I have to touch in Denmark.
MitID is great. It was developed and is still largely operated by the banking sector though. Though to be fair, the public sector was wise enough to adopt it rather than build their own. If you look at actual public sector projects like the recent taxation system for property tax you'll find things are quite a bit different.
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.