Parliament of Finland is a trailblazer in information technology issues. As early as the late 1980's all the MP's had access to e-mail through their personal computers. The comprehensive Internet service was launched in 1995 and in the process of updating its IT-system to be year 2000 compliant, Parliament inaugurated Teamware Office.

"The updating of our former groupware system for year 2000 would have required extensive measures, and therefore we decided to replace it with a more manageable and scalable system. Out of various alternatives we chose Teamware Office, said Olli Mustajärvi, Head of Information Technology, Parliament of Finland.

When inviting tenders from a number of groupware vendors, Parliament emphasized the smoothness of the process and the performance of the system. According to Mustajärvi the main factors in favor of Teamware Office were the manageability of the system running in a UNIX environment and the superior Web service. The Secure Mail functions of Teamware Office were also quite unique as well as fast implementation.

"The performance of a system running in one individual server is much more stable compared to a system running in several NT-servers. Remote use of the software is possible through the browser based services. Web Service also eliminates the system's dependence on Windows clients", noted Mustajärvi.

Huge amount of data transferred daily

E-mail is an essential tool for the Finnish Parliament nowadays. In addition to the 200 Members of Parliament all the civil servants working for Parliament have access to the internal and external Web servers as well as personal e-mail addresses. Therefore altogether approximately 1.000 persons use Teamware Office, and the number is growing.

Vast amount of data is transferred daily through the e-mail system. The number of outgoing messages is approximately 7.000-10.000 and the number of incoming messages 10.000-12.000. "The number as such doesn't reveal everything, but we also need to consider the size of individual messages. Due to our substantial publishing and PR activities the average size of a message is rather large. Therefore the amount of data transferred is huge, emphasized Outi Juntura from the IT department of Parliament.

Teamware Office has met the expectations of Parliament very well. The performance of the system has been stable and no program flaws have occurred. The users have been satisfied. "The feedback from the users has been positive. The system is easy to use and even the remote access functions work perfectly", told Juntura.

Also Teamware Office Calendar is in use in Parliament - although not yet on a regular basis. For example the resource scheduling, e.g. meeting rooms system of Parliament is managed through the Calendar as well as the schedules of individual parliamentary groups. The IT department would like to see the use of the Calendar grow: "It is not difficult to perceive the importance of shared calendar resources regarding for example the work of the MP's personal assistants."

Legislative documents available for all

The goal of Parliament's IT department is to support the legislative work of the MP's and to create an information channel between the citizens and Parliament. Under the Finnish constitution, sovereign power in Finland belongs to the people, who are represented by Parliament.

In the spirit of the Nordic openness the Finnish Parliament wanted to open its electronic text archives to all citizens. The public Web site was launched in 1995. Besides the comprehensive Finnish and Swedish language sites there are more concise English (http://www.parliament.fi) and French language sites. All Internet users can access up-to-date information about the legislative documents created in the Parliament, since the databases of Parliament have been connected to the Web.

In order to uniform and ease the use of the different parliamentary documents, Parliament launched the standardization process. The aim of the standardization was to transfer all documents into SGML format. SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) is an international standard for defining and representing documents in an application-independent form.
"Once all the documents are brought under the same structure they can be printed easily, published in the Internet or used in pdf-format, emphasized Olli Mustajärvi.

Making a difference has never been easier

Today the majority of the citizens' feedback to the MP's is sent by e-mail. "Earlier it was mostly the elderly citizens who gave feedback through traditional channels, but now also the younger generation has become more active in expressing their opinions to the decision makers - thanks to e-mail", said Mustajärvi.

In the future the Finnish Parliament will develop its IT services to meet even better the demands of modern information society. Interactive chat boards and Web casting will be the next steps in the enhanced process of democratic decision making.
"Web casting will eliminate the dependence on the location and the citizens will be able to attend Parliament plenaries even from their own living rooms. Taking part in the democratic decision making has never been easier. And still, this is only the beginning", promised Olli Mustajärvi.

Parliament of Finland exercises supreme decision-making authority in Finland, since the Constitution Act states: "Sovereign power in Finland belongs to the people, who are represented by Parliament." Every citizen who is eligible to vote can influence how this power is used by participating in general elections. Parliament's decisions are in turn reflected in citizens' everyday life. The unicameral Parliament with 200 seats passes legislation, decides on the state budget and supervises the activities of the Government and the agencies which operate under it. Parliament approves international treaties and participates in the national preparation of matters which are decided by the European Union.