Digitalization enables Helsinki residents to use City of Helsinki services regardless of time and place. More and more people in Helsinki can choose between digital and in-person services. Digitalization does not put an end to human encounter but provides alternatives.
The main themes of Helsinki’s digitalization process are related to increasingly efficient use of urban data with the help of a data strategy, better utilization of artificial intelligence, and services that anticipate service needs.
The City of Helsinki approved an ambitious Data Strategy in the spring of 2020. According to this strategy, the data produced by Helsinki should be the world’s most usable and most used city data by 2025. Utilization of data and analytics also enables more efficient knowledge management. The City can make better-informed decisions, predict the impact of action and automate decision-making.
The following are the key goals of the Data Strategy:
Anticipating service needs with the help of data
The City of Helsinki’s ambitious goal is to be able to anticipate the service needs of residents and thereby to ease their lives. In practice, this may mean, for example, that the City suggests a place of early childhood education to the parents of a pre-schooler, so the parents no longer need to apply for a place. The City possesses resident data including addresses and ages. Naturally the City knows its service locations. By combining all this data, it is possible to anticipate services needs.
At the same time, the City of Helsinki is committed to giving residents an opportunity to control the use of the data gathered on them. This means that the citizens of Helsinki must be able to either allow or, if they so wish, to deny the use of this data in the context of various City services.
City governed on the basis of up-to-date data
Contemporary analytics methods and the use of the city’s digital twin make it possible to review City of Helsinki operations and to simulate the outcomes of different decision alternatives in various ways before decision-making.
The digital twin indicates a manner of planning, testing and creating products and services in a virtual environment before they are actually produced. There are two next generation 3D city models of Helsinki available: a semantic city information model and a visually high-quality reality mesh model.
The city information model allows users to perform a variety of analyses, focusing on energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, the environmental impact of transport, and other. The reality mesh model can be utilized in a range of online services, and it can provide initial data for planning. Both city models are available as open data.
City activities and resources optimized
Up-to-date data and advanced analytics enable the activities and resources of City employees to be optimized and organized in the most economical manner. With the help of robotic process automation and data, internal City processes can be better automated and integrated.
The goal is to automate routine tasks in personnel and financial information management and thus to free working hours for customer service and for improvements in the quality of service. Another goal of the optimization of functions is to allow City employees to conduct flexible remote work with modern tools.
In practice, the paradigm shift means that the City focuses its funding on agile projects. It means that there are fewer heavy, multiyear investment projects, and such projects are implemented with increased scrutiny. There is a shift from projects to product and product portfolio management as well as to continuous improvement of products and portfolios.
Stimulating business by data sharing
It is a City of Helsinki goal to be able to share and to utilize the public data managed by the City increasingly well, even as a platform used by external ecosystems.
A central role here is played by Helsinki Region Infoshare, a joint open data service of the Helsinki metropolitan area cities. The service stores large volumes of public data on Helsinki and the rest of the metropolitan area, freely available to everyone to be utilized free of charge. External players, such as communities, universities and businesses, can conduct research with the City data and develop services where there are none provided by the City itself.
