I had the opportunity to hear how Nokia has been doing their co-creation. Jussi Mäkinen (@luovanto) gave a speech at a seminar on social media in marketing. Jussi is the marketing manager in charge of co-creation and launching of N900.
I especially liked a few points he brought up in his presentation.
I've talked (pardon, written) a lot about passion. So do Like Minds. The way I see it, these new social media "market squares" can be seen as tribes; communities that take form around one (or few) topics. They can be values, philosophies or ways to act. Most often, however, there is a core doing, something tangible that unites the people coming together.
But whatever that core is, most oftenly the brightest common nominator is passion.
Jussi brought up passion, too. In their search of the new, they came across high professionality, passion and freedom to create. On the other side, there are rigid hierarhcical structures of the official organization who has to cope with all kinds of regulations, even laws, restricting their R&D funcion.
Agility, to my understanding, is the main explanation to why unofficial structures are capable to come up with results and create faster than "the old school". How then does agility live inside our organizations? There's evidence that it doesn't.
There's talk about Facebook generation and High-Performance Teams and Radical Management. We need new kinds of structures to nurture these workers - creators - in their new ways of doing things. The same applies in the public sector!
Gone are the good old days of industrial management, eh?
Developers in the 21st century are very privileged. With seats in the front row, we are equipped with apps and tech and knowledge our ancestors only dreamt of.
But what counts the most in our ability to create new, is our ability to apply and enrich what has already been done.
In ICT "that old" often seems to be an impediment. But the deep fulfillment in life comes from beating the difficulties, solving the problems and climbing over the mountains of obstacles.
Enough with the chitchat, what I wanted to share with you today, is a notion I'd call the fourth step in developing eServices.
Developing ICT-based services is like..
Me and my colleague developers and visionaries have often envied the "new" Eastern European countries. They had a fresh start, building everything from the scratch, being able to align everything at once, at least, so it seems. More mature ICT-countries suffer from the burden of the past. Our systems are partly old technique, and combining that old with something new and very different can be tough, costly - sometimes even impossible.
..building with blocks?
What I've learned, in my networks of different branches of the society, is to look at things like blocks or Legos, if you like, and then share the same blocks whenever possible. It seems to me that building something new can only start at the ground level - obviously! For the most efficient outcome, it also needs to be modular, done with blocks.
In public sector, my fear is that we're always trying to build something else.. something that "can't be built with these old blocks, so let's build a brand new something else" - only to find out that we can't get rid of that old one, either, because this new one needs bits and pieces of that old one. Or, that old one still carries a bit of the old process and the new one takes care of only part of the entity.
For higher productivity we would need solutions that truly make it possible to let go of something old. Otherwise our empire keeps eternally expanding.
Data as the smallest joint particle
When you can isolate data into the smallest mutual factor, you can look at any process as a flow of data. The real productivity can only be achieved with wisdom: sharing information, combining processes whenever possible and starting with the customer / citizen. A few great examples on this road to Real-Time Economy
eInvoicing takes all the information electronically, from system A to system B. It is the green way, the productive way and the most efficient way to work. And, thanks to development alongside SEPA, eInvoicing with its ISO20022 standard will also enable carrying that data of the financial transaction directly to accounting.
Fully Integrated Accounting can thus entail data from the eInvoicing, via an electronic accounting reference. Further on, data on actual payments and the different particles, split payments, of the total amount can also be verified by the bank.
Overlapping use of data needs..
Accounting, however, is only the halfway. Closing the books starts the marathon of a multitude of reporting. Businesses need to file in their tax returns, report to statistics, file their financial statement in the trade register, to name but a few. All those "sub-processes" demand skills and further calculations.
Now, with our previous thought of joint data as building blocks, Unified Reporting Code (F) has now split certain items of information into smaller fragments in a way that enables more automatic reporting in Finland.
..harmonization of concepts
Essential blocks are the steps toward more Real-Time Economy and higher productivity. What public sector needs to do and has now started to do, is unifying its core concepts. Definitions and meanings must be unified, in order to ICT to co-work, mingle and be integrated.
With meta data, relations and data models taken care of, a real ontology will one day enable semantic web and enormous savings in overlapping workload, vain searches and loss of information.
I had the opportunity to hear how Nokia has been doing their co-creation. Jussi Mäkinen (@luovanto) gave a speech at a seminar on social media in marketing. Jussi is the marketing manager in charge of co-creation and launching of N900. 
