Good examples of Human-Centric Governance

Sirpa Service design as a service

What is this initiative?

Finland’s Programme to Promote Life-Event Based Digitalisation to develop seamless digital services tailored to significant life and business events. Initiated by Ministry of Finance through strategic planning and national digitalization goals. DVV is following these goals and a designteam made a proposal for how life-events could be developed using human-centered approach.

DVV also offer sparring and design support to public sector organizations plus projects and interventions at a cost to help public sector organizations develop their services with a strong human-centric approach. This service enables authorities to systematically analyze user needs, map customer journeys, and co-create solutions that enhance accessibility, efficiency, and overall service quality. By providing expertise, tools, and facilitation, DVV empowers organizations to ensure that digital services are not only technologically advanced but also intuitive and responsive to people's real-life needs.

What are its main goals or intended outcomes?

• to reduce administrative burden
• Improve public service efficiency
• Provide proactive services and still to understand when people want to act themselves
• Support citizens during life events with minimal effort
  

Who started it, and who else is involved?

• Led by the Ministry of Finance started with The State Treasury and The Finnish Digital and Population Data Services Agency (DVV)
• Involves ministries, agencies, municipalities, DVV, and other stakeholders
  Scope: National programme, started since 2017 and later digitalization as horizontal development

Where is the initiative being carried out?

Life event -based digitalization is developed mainly in national level involving citizen services development also in regional and local levels.

How has the initative evolved over time? What key steps was made along the way?

• How did the initiative get started?
  Initiated by Ministry of Finance through strategic planning and national digitalization goals. DVV is following these goals and a designteam made a proposal for how life-events could be developed using human-centered approach. The work was done together
• What were the major phases or activities?
  Key phases:
  - 2017: Individual authorities began life-event approach and questioning how to understand customer’s service path
  - 2019–2020: “Ecosystem of death” and designing collaboration B2B2P
  - 2022–2023: Updated strategy, collaborative models, service design support
  - 2024–2025: Retirement as life event, stakeholder interviews and use of interfaces, suggestions to development

Have there been important milestones or turning points?

• Creation of developer network
• Identification of 40 life events and creating criteria for impactful service packages
• Strategic steering group established

How does the initiative contribute to a human-centric approach?

Human Centric public services

• Based on identified user needs (e.g. death of a loved one, retirement)
• Methods: user-centered design, participatory design, co-creation
• Accessibility: services are secure, easy-to-use, and inclusive – thes are embedded to design process

Human Centric Governance

• Focus shifted from administrative structures to user needs is built in following criteria:

1) the needs of dealing with several public services, companies or communities,

2) the flow and the utilization of information between different parties and

• guidance for handling a complex situation.
• Strategic steering group ensures inclusive decision-making
• Funding mechanisms support cross-sector collaboration as the design expertise is offered by the Ministry of Finances

How does the initiative help shift focus from administrative structures to user needs?

• This initiative helps to create concepts and support decisions making processes. The concepts are made together with several organizations and involving people with different background, both creating understanding of customers or worker experience.

Innovation

• Developer network fosters transparency and experimentation
• Use of automation and data exchange to streamline services
• Prototypes tested in retirement and death-related service paths. Collaboration with other organizations i.e. Sitra testing platforms to get citizen’s ideas and feedback

What have you learned throughout the process?

Concrete actions and politics go hand in hand. Both are needed. An operational design team in public sector development helps to build trust between organizations as they don’t come outside as consultancy usually does. This makes procurements more precise.

Impact of the Initiative- What effects has the initiative had so far?

• Improved service paths (e.g. retirement, death in family) and life-events mentioned in Government program
• Reduced need for personal advice through automation
• Enhanced cooperation between authorities
• Increased use of digital services (e.g. Suomi.fi notifications)
• measurable improvements are seen when development process is quicker, the user experience quides procurement and there are less calls and less visits in public services in the address (e.g. user experience, efficiency, engagement)?

• how people work and collaborate is changing as collaboration helps to identify common resources
• Building new services and using interfaces, i.e. shareholder register in death for estate inventory

What remains unknown or needs further development?

• Funding mechanisms for human-centric projects are still created and negoatiated case by case
• Data ownership and personal privacy issues
• Citizen involvement in legislative processes
• Balancing cost-efficiency with user-centeredness

In what ways could the initiative become more human-centric?

Consider the following areas when you reflect:

• Governance: Creating funding mechanisms that support human-centric projects and to encourage cross-sector collaboration. Funding can be seen also as models to use common resources to create impact in general and not only for organization’s own purposes.
• Services: Aiming service packages, using participatory design in different levels
• Innovation: Identifying citizens challenges and Involving in the legislative process addressing data ownership and sharing, ensuring personal privacy. Eliminating unnecessary. There are new ways and platforms to test ideas, analyze with AI-tools and use visualizations when co-creating.

Are there any relevant references or documentation you can share?

• https://vm.fi/en/digitalising-and-automating-life-and-business-events
  
• https://vm.fi/en/easing-the-management-of-the-affairs-of-a-deceased-relative
  
• https://www.suomi.fi/instructions-and-support/general-information/what-is-suomifihttps://kehittajille.suomi.fi/frontpage
  
• https://dvv.fi/en/individuals
• Human-centric design:
  https://www.eoppiva.fi/koulutukset/kehittamistyota-tehdaan-yhdessa-ihmiskeskeinen-kehittaminen-kumppaneiden-ja-verkostojen-kanssa/

The Digital Citizen Meeting (“Medborgarmöte”) App – Digg

What is this initiative?

The Digital Citizen Meeting app is a conceptual national “front door” to Sweden’s public sector – a unified, secure and personalised digital meeting place between residents/companies and public authorities. The initiative was initiated through a government assignment from the Swedish Government to Digg – the Agency for Digital Government – to propose the long-term development and management of the national digital infrastructure Ena and to strengthen human-centric digital public services.

Its purpose is to:

• Shorten processing times
• Reduce administrative burden
• Improve the quality and consistency of services
• Simplify everyday interactions with the public sector for both citizens and businesses

Problem it addresses

Today, Swedish digital public services are fragmented across many agencies, municipalities and regions. Services are frequently organised around internal mandates rather than people’s life events. They are offered through multiple portals, apps and “My Pages” with different log-ins. This makes it difficult for people and businesses to know where to turn, understand how services fit together, and experience proactive, human-centric digital services.

Main goals and intended outcomes

The initiative aims to deliver:

• One coherent digital front door to the public sector
• Life-event and life-situation–based navigation, instead of administration-based
• User control over data through a secure digital wallet for identity, attributes and documents
• Integrated functionality for digital post, case tracking and secure signatures
• Accessible and inclusive services that work for different user groups and roles
• A resilient communication channel for important and crisis-related information

Who is involved?

The initiative has been developed by Digg within the framework of the government assignment on Sweden’s national digital infrastructure (Ena). It builds on Digg’s analyses of identity, trust and digital public infrastructure; Sweden’s decision to introduce a state e-ID and prepare for a European Digital Identity Wallet; and experience sharing and knowledge transfer with Nordic agencies (Digdir, DVV) and Ukraine’s Diia team through ongoing collaboration.

Scope and status

Level: National, with clear potential for cross-border and Nordic/EU use.

Status: Ongoing, conceptual and prototyped. It is explicitly a hypothesis and visualisation, not yet a decided product or service.

How has the initiative evolved over time?

Origins

The initiative started from a government assignment from the Swedish Government to Digg to propose the long-term development and management of the national digital infrastructure Ena. Within this assignment, Digg concluded that Sweden lacks a coherent, human-centric approach to digital public services, does not have a central citizen portal and has no common life-event architecture. At the same time, important enablers such as a state e-ID, the EU Digital Identity Wallet and strengthened national digital infrastructure are emerging. This created a window to explore what a digital citizen meeting could look like when built on shared national and European rails.

Key phases

• How did the initiative get started?
  This is an idea inspired by developments in e.g. the Ukraine with the Diio app and a political will in Sweden to bridge the gap with other Nordic countries who all have citizen portals with digital public services categorized by life-events.
• Have there been important milestones or turning points?

From a strategic point of view, the most recent happening of importance is the release of the new Swedish digitalization strategy for 2025-2030 that explicity calls for a single-point of entry for citizens to the public digital services.

How does the initiative support a human-centric approach?

We have adopted a human-centric approach by looking at the following design-choices:

1. Human-centric & inclusive by default (focus on life-events and accessibility).
2. A “Wallet-first” identity & consent function (user control over data and granular sharing).
3. Build on Digital Public Infrastructures (DPI) and in accordance with EU-acts like the Interoperability Act (avoidd bespoke stacks and promotes the use of shared rails).
4. Once-only & data-spaces ready (Follows recommendations from Data Governance Act and a focus on utilizing common data spaces and minimizing the need for manual form-filling etc.).
5. Lean governance, strict anti-fragmentation (align with EU simplification and enforcement policy).

This initaive aims at a human-centric approach by creating a unified, personalised interface (“one front door”) that aggregates national/municipal/region services and leans on the concept of relying on the national digital infrastructure and looking at possible connections with the EU eID Wallet (eIDAS 2.0).

Initially the initiative focuses on 4–6 cross-agency, high-volume life events (e.g., start a business, move, study/work across EU, vaccinations/health proofs, caregiver compensation). Life-events as a category for sorting digital public services is missing at the moment in Sweden so the initiatve aims to learn from the lessons learned in other Nordic countries.

Sign-in and attribute-sharing should be done via the national e-ID and EU Wallets and allow for proactive nudges where lawful, making the use of the app as secure as possible.

How does the initiative help shift focus from administrative structures to user needs?

The initiative helps shift focus from administrative structures and mandates to life events, life situations and user journeys. It highlights the need for shared governance across authorities and levels of government for common functions such as identity, wallet, post, case overview and crisis information. It underlines the importance of cross-government decisions on roles, responsibilities, quality, accessibility, security and long-term development, and governance models that enable Nordic and EU-level interoperability while keeping user trust at the centre.

The initiative promotes innovation by treating digital identity and the wallet as key enablers for new service patterns; integrating AI-enhanced navigation and assistants in the core concept; and exploring ways to combine national infrastructure with local, community-level content and services, inspired by existing municipal apps.

What have we learned so far?

Early lessons include that a human-centric, life-situation perspective requires long-term continuity and governance, not short-term projects; that identity and trust infrastructure is foundational; that Nordic and Ukrainian examples show large-scale citizen apps and portals are feasible but must be adapted to Sweden’s context; and that a prototype clearly described as a hypothesis is a powerful tool for aligning discussions and exposing trade-offs early.

What impact has the initiative had so far?

While there are no user-level metrics yet, the initiative has created a shared vision and vocabulary (“digital citizen meeting”) for policymakers and practitioners, linked discussions on identity, infrastructure and service design, and clarified why questions of governance, financing and long-term management must be addressed jointly if a citizen app is to be successful.

What remains unknown or needs further development?

Key open areas include desirability and expectations among different user groups; technical feasibility and integration, including end-to-end flows with real or realistic data; governance and financing, such as ownership, operation and cost sharing; and ethics, privacy and trust, including acceptable levels of data-driven proactivity and the design of consent, transparency and accountability.

How could the initiative become even more human-centric?

From a governance perspective, the initiative could further strengthen life events and life situations as organising principles, involve citizens and civil society in priority-setting and evaluation, and ensure stable funding and neutral operation of core functions. From a service perspective, it could deepen co-design with users who face the greatest barriers, integrate local and community-level information and participation, and go beyond legal minimum requirements on accessibility. From an innovation perspective, experimentation environments and sandboxes, AI-supported digital agents and user-centred success metrics could be used to guide iteration and scaling.

References and further information

Digg – concept and prototype for the Digital Citizen Meeting (“Medborgarmöte”).: Bilaga Medborgarmöte - till slutredovisningens Förslag till långsiktig utveckling och förvaltning av Ena External link.

Example: Life Event: Death and Inheritance (Norway)

What is this initiative?

The life event death and inheritance is one of seven prioritised life events in Norway’s digitalisation strategy. Its goal is to make it easier for bereaved families by simplifying bureaucratic processes, enabling secure data sharing, and creating coherent services across multiple authorities.

How has the initiative evolved?

• 2019: Included in Norway’s national digitalisation strategy.
• 2020–2021: Mapping of user journeys, co-creation with bereaved families, and service design principles developed.
• 2021: The Digital Estate project initiated, linked to updates in the Inheritance Act.
• 2022: AI-based seamless service proof-of-concept tested in the Nordic DigiGov Lab.
• 2025: Ongoing development and user-testing of the final service.

Contribution to human-centric approach

• Services: Focus on the needs of bereaved families; reduction of complex, paper-based processes.
• Governance: Digdir as national coordinator, horizontal cooperation between ministries.
• Innovation: AI experimentation for seamless services, systemic design methods.

Learnings

• Co-creation and mapping of real-life needs helped shape services that reduce burden on citizens.
• Clear governance and designated coordination role were key.

Impact so far

• Bereaved families experience a more coherent, predictable process.
• Increased collaboration across agencies.

Remaining challenges

• Developing sustainable governance models for the operational phase.
• Ensuring inclusivity for all groups.

How could it become more human-centric?

• Strengthen systemic design approaches.
• Maintain dynamic governance structures that integrate user perspectives.

References

• Dødsfall og arv (Digdir.no). External link.
• Link to the webinar where the example was presented. Nordic DigiGov Lab 2024-2026 – where no one is left behind (Digg.se) External link.

Example: Design System for Cohesive User Experience (Norway)

What is this initiative?

The Norwegian public sector Design System is a shared digital toolbox with essential UI components, guidelines, and patterns. Its aim is to support development of user-friendly, accessible, and consistent digital services across government.

How has the initiative evolved?

• 2022: Opened for contributions, launched with 900 participants.
• 2022–2023: User research identified key issues; collaborative guidelines created.
• 2024: Expanded with developers from five organisations.
• Ongoing: Maintained by a cross-agency development team coordinated by Digdir.

Contribution to human-centric approach

• Services: Improves accessibility and inclusiveness by providing ready-to-use components.
• Governance: Open development, product advisory board with 12 public agencies.
• Innovation: Encourages reuse, experimentation, and open-source collaboration.

Learnings

• Open communication and transparency fostered strong engagement.
• Shared ownership increased adoption across agencies.

Impact so far

• Hundreds of agencies using the system.
• More consistent user experiences across digital services.

Remaining challenges

• Sustaining cross-agency engagement.
• Keeping guidelines updated as user needs evolve.

How could it become more human-centric?

• Embed foresight and systemic design to prepare for future needs.
• Expand support for co-creation with end users.

References

• Link to the webinar where the example was presented. Nordic DigiGov Lab 2024-2026 – where no one is left behind (Digg.se) External link.

Programme to Promote Life-Event Based Digitalisation (Finland)

What is this initiative?
Led by the Ministry of Finance and coordinated by DVV, the programme aims to digitalise ~40 key life and business events by 2030. Its purpose is to create seamless services tailored to real-life situations, with strong emphasis on accessibility and inclusion.

How has the initiative evolved?

• 2017: Initial life-event approach introduced.
• 2022: Updated national strategy incorporated life-events.
• 2022–2023: Strategic steering group and developer network established.
• Ongoing: Prioritisation of events such as Death of a Loved One.

Contribution to human-centric approach

• Services: Life-event focus ensures services align with people’s situations, not administrative silos.
• Governance: DVV coordinates projects across ministries; cross-government steering group in place.
• Innovation: Service design as a service; shared infrastructure (e.g., digital identity, authorisation).

Learnings

• Cross-sector collaboration is essential but requires sustainable funding mechanisms.
• Citizen involvement in legislative processes is critical for trust.

Impact so far

• Prioritised events identified and addressed.
• Service design capacity built across agencies.

Remaining challenges

• Balancing cost efficiency with user-centred solutions.
• Addressing data ownership and personal privacy issues.

How could it become more human-centric?

• Deeper citizen involvement in co-creation.
• Continued investment in shared infrastructure and inclusive design.

References

• Digitalising and automating life and business events – Ministry of Finance External link.,
• Link to the webinar where the example was presented. Nordic DigiGov Lab 2024-2026 – where no one is left behind (Digg.se) External link.