Skip to content
An official website of the OECD. Find out more
Created by the Public Governance Directorate

This website was created by the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI), part of the OECD Public Governance Directorate (GOV).

How to validate authenticity

Validation that this is an official OECD website can be found on the Innovative Government page of the corporate OECD website.

Explore government spending

Tutkihankintoja.fi opens the real-time view to government spending to citizens and interest groups. The service enhances the government openness, highlights the importance of procurement in creating savings to the nation and develops procurement practices in government organizations.

Innovation Summary

Innovation Overview

Governments around the world spend 12% of their GDP in procuring supplies, services, and works from the private sector. For this, the governments spend tax payer’s money but often the taxpayers and interest groups do not know how and where the money is spent. Also, the government entities themselves may not know the spend before financial statements are formed after the year has ended. While the transparency of budgeting process ensures that the public knows how the money is planned to be spent and the public procurement rules guarantee transparency during the tendering stage, the public and even civil servants may not have visibility into how the money is actually spent.

In 2016 the Finnish central government created a user-friendly service to citizens and interest groups for studying government budgeting data (www.tutkibudjettia.fi). The service visualizes the government spent proposal, which was earlier available only in a format that impeded comparing the data. To further open the government data, Hansel engaged in 2016 in a project to publish openly also the actual government spending data. When any central government entity pays an invoice to a supplier the data would be displayed in real-time in an open and easy to understand service that is accessible to any interested party.

The new service www.tutkihankintoja.fi was launched to the public in September 2017 and includes the government spending data since 1.1.2016. The service shows amongst others the number of suppliers, suppliers’ names and how much each central government organization paid to the suppliers. The service also shows the information on a daily basis: the public can filter the data by intervals and see several key indicators. The government spending data is also published in. csv format on the national open data portal for analyzing the data further.

The objectives of the project were:

1. To gather together the government spending data

2. To filter and format the data in a unified manner for making it comparable across government organizations

3. To publish the data openly

The beneficiaries of the project are taxpayers, the government organizations, and supplier, alike. Through the service, the taxpayers get easy to understand the view of how the government spends taxpayers’ money. The government organizations get a real-time view to their spent and can better control and monitor it. The service also makes it easier to detect discrepancies as all monetary transactions, regardless of their value, are made public. The suppliers’ can view who are the government organizations current suppliers and get a better view of the spent by each organization. The service may also bring about the better value in procurement to government organizations: when the suppliers have access to current government spent, they may propose cheaper and more efficient alternatives in tendering procedures.

Innovation Description

What Makes Your Project Innovative?

Compared to the situation before, the innovation makes the government spending data visible in real-time to public and to government organizations in an easy to understand format and as easy to access online service. The service gathers together the government spend from all central government organizations and displays the information in real-time online. While the data was available to the public also before, the requesting party had to ask the data from each central organization separately and every entity had to put the information together separately.

The centralized service unifies the data so that it is comparable across central government organizations and removes the task of putting the data together for the requesting party from the government organizations.

What is the current status of your innovation?

Tutkihankintoja.fi was developed as part of the Government program for digitalizing the government processes and as a natural continuum to tutkibudjettia.fi service launched one year earlier. The project was initiated by the Ministry of Finance that is the owner of central government procurement development and handed over to Hansel for implementation in early 2017. The service was launched to the public on September 4th, 2017. The developed new service is part of the government’s large-scale program on digitalizing the end-to-end procurement and government services to citizens and companies by 2019. With the program, the government also aims at creating new job opportunities in the digital economy sector and fostering economic growth.

By publishing the government spending data also as open data, the government aims at giving private sector examples of services that they can develop further.

By combining the other data already publicly available (budgeting data, tendering data and now also the government spend data) private sector can develop new digital services that combine the data from publicly available sources for creating new innovative services and solutions that add value to suppliers and government organizations. For instance, when applying advanced data mining tools, the private sector digital service providers can create saleable services to buyers in the public sector and sellers in the private sector.

The project was developed as an agile IT development project. The agile development method ensured quick technical implementation: the technical part was largely ready for launch already in spring 2017, however, the public service required further technical tweaks until the launch date. Major issue delaying the launch was, however, the integrity of the data: all government organizations needed to go through their invoicing data and decide which data can be released to the public without sacrificing data security and national interests in procurement data secrecy.

In our view, OECD OPSI can be a good vehicle for spreading the innovation and lessons learned to other OECD member countries.

Innovation Development

Collaborations & Partnerships

Bringing about the service required the extensive collaboration of government organizations, Hansel, suppliers of IT systems, and most importantly the Ministry of Finance. The Ministry of Finance as the initiator of the project continued its support throughout the implementation project and assisted in solving issues related to defense and security sensitive data. Also, with the support from the Ministry of Finance and its large-scale program on digitalizing the government procurement the project received the attention that it would not have received alone. The State Treasury, the Finnish Government Shared Services Centre for Finance and HR (Palkeet), Government ICT Centre and the Population Register Centre consulted the project during its implementation. Also, several private sector suppliers, including Great Apes, CGI, Onsight and Microsoft provided their expertise and support to the project in technical implementation.

Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

In addition to collaboration with various departments within the government administration and suppliers, the innovation also needed input from government organizations: they need to classify their invoicing data. The launch of the service was supported by the Finnish NGOs on Open Data.

Innovation Reflections

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

Already during the project and specifically after its launch, the government organizations have increasingly paid attention to procurement and ordering practices. The year-end spending spree for emptying the budget (a worldwide issue in budgeted spending) has raised attention in government organizations. The issue has been observed also by the public and interest groups. Elimination of “budget emptying” would create further savings to the government budget. The project has also brought about the need for additional innovations: numerous small value purchases made by debit and credit cards cannot be classified as belonging to certain categories in the openly published data. There is a need to develop the debit and credit card invoicing data to include additional details than what is exchanged electronically today.

Challenges and Failures

Major challenges that impeded the launch of the service were data security and secrecy issues. Even though the service was technically ready already well before its launch date on September 4th, 2017 additional time was required to allow the government organization to check that data of security sensitive purchases was not shown in the online system.

Conditions for Success

For gathering together the government spends, strong support from the political decision-making level is necessary. In our case, the political support needed was the government program’s vision to digitalize the government services and to open the data to the public. The project needed, first, dedication and enthusiasm that the core team carrier onwards also to affected government organizations. The strong will to carry out the project in allocated time was another success factor for bringing the service alive. Emotions that challenged the responsible team were crucial to its success: the team pushed through the obstacles for the greater purpose and vision of the service.

Replication

Many governments already gather together the spending data. However, this data is not made public. With small effort and with the help of agile IT project methods, a dedicated team that is assigned to the task and have been given appropriate authorizations and responsibilities to carry out the task can deliver miracles.

Lessons Learned

When a government embarks on a mission to publish the spending data openly, major challenges are likely to be linked to data secrecy. Part of the government spending is likely to be secret that would need to be hidden, removed or anonymized in the service available to the public. The process for hiding, removing and anonymising the data is a difficult process that needs to be dealt with each government entity separately. In our case the Ministry of Finance support was crucial. Even though the Ministry of Finance sent out the communication already in March 2017 on marking security sensitive invoicing data, the process needed many face to face meetings with government agencies to explain the aim and expected benefits to government organizations, their suppliers and other stakeholders.

Year: 2012
Level of Government: National/Federal government

Status:

Innovation provided by:

Date Published:

16 May 2017

Join our community:

It only takes a few minutes to complete the form and share your project.