Implementing Digital Government in the Finnish Parliament

Abstract

The Finnish Parliament has been active in utilizing information and communication technologies in the parliamentary work as well as in communicating with citizens and other organizations. As common in public sectors, work, knowledge management, and communication in the environment is document-centric. A strategic issue in implementing digital government has been SGML/XML standardization. The Finnish Parliament has been a pioneer in the adoption of SGML/XML technologies. The chapter reports experiences from the standardization efforts. The implications of the standardization will be examined from the viewpoints of documents, information technology, work with documents, the Finnish Parliament, and the whole society. From the point of view of a citizen, the major effect of the standardized document production is the improved accessibility to legislative information through the Internet. Plans for new knowledge management solutions and semantic Web services will be discussed at the end of the chapter.