The Danish digital experience shows how standard solutions can speed and ease the transformation of essential services
The Digital Strategy published in March continues to drive its digital transformation and sets out an independent and forward thinking strategy. The importance and pace of government digitalisation was well appreciated prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.
However, the pandemic has accelerated this digital transformation and shown that digitalised public services are more resilient to the challenges and disruptions of pandemics, or any other threats, in the maintenance and delivery of government.
It appears that Covid and its variants will be present and a threat for years to come, although hopefully fatalities and serious illness will be minimised through vaccination and anti-viral treatments. What is clear is that the ability to digitalise fast and efficiently will be even more important.
The Danish Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which cBrain is helping effect a rapid and comprehensive digital transformation, is an illustration of how resilient digital services are. In 2020, EPA’s productivity was maintained throughout the year as its Production Data shows.
There was no decrease in productivity as staff worked from home and services continued to be delivered through the various lockdowns.
The only decreases were for March and July, during the national holiday weeks, otherwise it was business as usual. Thanks to our technology we were able to help our customer maintain productivity and continue to deliver government services.
Scotland is making real progress in achieving the digital objectives it has set itself. Capgemini’s UN eGovernment Benchmark Scotland 2020 Report assessed Scotland’s digital progress with
an overall average score of 67 per cent, outperforming the EU27+ (59 per cent) and the UK (54 per cent). Denmark (77 per cent) came first.
Danish technology is already contributing to the Scottish digital transformation and cBrain wants to share its experiences of building digital government around the world and support Scotland to progress further and faster.
The fight against climate change and global warming is largely driven and funded by governments and by making use of legislation and financial incentives, politicians have a very powerful toolbox that can be leveraged.
However, strong and accountable institutions must implement political decisions and the reality is that it often takes years to execute decisions due to bureaucratic delays, fuelled by the lack of digitisation and inefficient IT systems.
Our climate software is based on reusable open source configuration and best practices developed in close collaboration with the Danish EPA, so meaning it can easily be re-used and applied across the world.
As part of its ongoing collaboration with the Danish government, cBrain has developed climate software for governments, which helps them accelerate the deployment of climate action initiatives.
Our F2 climate software supports a broad portfolio of environmental processes, from approvals and grant management to inspections.
In November 2020, the Danish Parliament adopted legislation to take carbon-rich farmland out of production. By February 2021, the Danish EPA managed to run the first round of the €300m programme.
The Danish farmland programme has a potential to reduce CO2 emissions in Denmark by up to 20 per cent. By using cBrain’s climate software for government the Danish EPA has implemented its vision within months instead of years.
Denmark, which is leading by example, has a strong tradition in sharing best practices with other countries. A solution which cBrain designed for the Danish EPA, is now being implemented by the government of Guyana in South America to protect and regulate the trade of endangered species in the Amazon rainforest.
This demonstrates how governments across the globe can share, reuse, and collaborate to protect and restore biodiversity and make a positive contribution to climate action – building software for a more sustainable world.
Standard software solution supports critical services
cBrain is a Danish software house headquartered in Copenhagen and has more than 15 years of experience in collaborating with governments and public sector entities to achieve digital transformation.
We have developed our own technology platform F2, a 100 per cent integrated standard software specifically designed to support governments.
Governments and other public institutions often have their business-critical IT solutions delivered by large turnkey projects, integrating and customising software packages.
cBrain has a different approach created by its standard F2 software so that mission-critical applications can be created and delivered in very short order by simply configuring the software
The formalised methods and built-in best practices ensure quality as well as meeting user and organisational requirements.
The configurability of F2 enables fast-track delivery, primarily because time is not spent writing and maintaining code required to link different software components as required by non-standard software.
Many of our customer-specific solutions – from analysing work processes to configuring the standard software and going live – have been delivered within two to six months.
This is possible because F2 offers two layers: F2 Base and F2 Process.
The Base layer is comprehensive and supports all necessary functionality out-of-the box, for example, case management, communication, roles, approvals, requests, compliance and knowledge sharing.
The Process layer supports business-specific processes, organised by case types, and stored as configuration templates in the F2 Process Library.
A process can be configured from scratch or delivered by adapting existing configuration templates from the F2 Process library, for example, inspections, licences’ certifications, grants, and a growing portfolio of climate software solutions supporting environmental processes.
Today, F2 is used by more than 75 government organisations and many end-to-end solutions have been deployed. This list of clients includes 17 out of 21 Danish ministries and agencies.
Internationally, cBrain has delivered F2 projects for government organisations in the UK, Germany, US, France, Canada, the United Arab Emirates and Latin America.
cBrain’s approach is recognised as an international best practice and was identified by the European Union as one of the leading examples of standard-based implementations for electronic document management in its study on interoperability of standards in public administration.
To learn more, please contact ajd@cbrain.com
