Human-centric approach to city services

Swedish city Uppsala is a vibrant municipality, committed to environmental conservation, renewable energy, green transportation, and eco-friendly urban planning. It is also home to Uppsala University, one of Scandinavia’s most prestigious institutions and a hub of education and research. Its dynamic and forward-thinking nature is exemplified by the vision to become the most digitalized city in northern Europe by 2030.

Uppsala, Sweden’s fourth largest municipality, is home to almost 250,000 people
whose needs and daily challenges inspire the region’s ongoing and focused effort
towards digitization and transformation. The municipality is known for its historical
significance and innovative approach to sustainability, weaving together tradition and forward-thinking, to streamline its operations and improve people’s lives through its many services.

“The municipality’s remit is very broad, including everything from education and childcare to urban development and construction,” says Thomas Ekvall, former CIO of Uppsala municipality. “We aim to package our services in a way that makes it easy for the citizens. We want to emphasize that we, as a municipality, should be service-oriented. It is important that we meet the needs of our citizens and not just focus on complying with laws and regulations.”

Uppsala is exemplifying this nature by seamlessly combining its rich heritage with a
vision for a sustainable future. By 2050, Uppsala wants to increase its population to
320,000 people and aims to be one of Europe’s most digitalized municipalities by 2030. It is not simply a goal of modernization but a new way of life for the region that would merge together most of the municipality’s responsibilities.

With this in mind, Uppsala teamed up with Fujitsu to develop a proof of concept for
the “Journey of Life”, a huge digital transformation project that would offer digital
services to all citizens via a single technical platform.

The goal of the project is to make each online experience seamless, connecting all
city services, as well as public leisure spaces, in a way that would allow citizens to
organize anything—from childcare and bill payments to leisure time—in one system.

The concept that includes IT structure, development, and service design required close collaboration between Fujitsu and the municipality. Fujitsu interviewed many Uppsala citizens, systematically dissected all the different layers of life events—from moving house and planning a wedding, to starting a family, choosing early years childcare, and finding residential care for the elderly—and brought together all the relevant people and stakeholders involved in any type of activity or service that could then be digitized and simplified. This two-year effort has been the epitome of a human-centric approach and involved 3,000 hours of work, 500 data points, 10 workshops, and a design sprint.

“The project is about identifying those we serve and meeting them where they are,”
says Ekvall. “With Fujitsu, we have developed customer journeys aimed at automating and digitizing services. The ultimate goal is to benefit citizens through digital service development.”

To achieve this goal, while exemplifying sustainability and efficiency, the team used
design methods as tools, which addressed operational requirements while balancing them with ensuring greater efficiency of IT investments. As an added benefit, focusing on making things easier for the city has created a more connected and empowered environment for the people trying to make this happen.

This connectedness embodies the project’s principles, embracing the benefits of
working with early prototypes in cross-functional groups for the development of Uppsala’s operations. In essence, the project brought together the municipality’s
departments, companies, and politicians under the shared vision for digitalization,
increased efficiency, and would a world-class customer experience. What's more, over 3000 IT employees are now better connected across the organization.

Uppsala municipality is leading the way towards the “new world” of simplicity,
sustainability, and connected society. It represents a new way of thinking about IT
systems and services as well as using service design to improve everyone’s daily lives.

But Uppsala is not only trailblazing its way to a more connected life for its citizens
and services, it’s leading by example by showing others how to get there. Although the entire project will take six years to implement, the proof of concept can now be adopted by other municipalities and cities that wish to make a move towards digital citizenship.

The collaboration, sharing of ideas, and effort from Fujitsu and Uppsala created
something that will usher a new era of city life. And the relationship that made this
concept possible earned Fujitsu the highest customer satisfaction scores for two
consecutive years. “It has been a very rewarding collaboration,” comments Ekvall.
“The team has helped us define the customer journey and think from the outside in.
After the feasibility study, we will now continue the development with various proofs of concept to develop service-based solutions, make all the systems work together, and make our customer journey as smooth as possible.”