Two major projects have been launched in North Karelia, the easternmost region of Finland and the European Union, comprising of nineteen municipalities. The projects aim at creating both a regional portal as well as an area network including all required services. The main idea is to produce consumer oriented public services for the citizens of the North Karelia region. The project is the first of its kind including the whole province. The communications portal platform and services are provided by Teamware Group.

Two major projects have been launched in North Karelia, the easternmost region of Finland and the European Union, comprising of nineteen municipalities. The projects aim at creating both a regional portal as well as an area network including all required services. The main idea is to produce consumer oriented public services for the citizens of the North Karelia region. The project is the first of its kind including the whole province. The communications portal platform and services are provided by Teamware Group.

The ongoing pilot is backed by two significant development programs funded by the EU and the Finnish government, mainly through the Ministry of the Interior - together with the Eastern Finland State Provincial Office, the Regional Council of North Karelia, the Employment and Economic Development Centre for North Karelia, and the North Karelia Regional Environment Centre.

The public services will be transformed into concrete entities and service chains easily accessible to citizens, civil servants and service providers. This will ensure that information and services are available at all times. It also supports citizen participation and interaction according to the Finnish JHS recommendations for public administration.

'We want to improve dissemination of information on the web and offer more efficient electronic services resulting in a higher number of satisfied users,' describes Mr. Matti Hakomäki, Project Manager of the regional pilot. 'We cooperate tightly with municipalities and federations of municipalities. We also make good use of existing national and provincial network services. Thus, we are able to create a true provincial portal providing two-way communication, initiation of actions, document routing and follow-up. A useful application would, for example, be a shared provincial event calendar by which civil servants in different municipalities could organize a car pool to a joint training event in another locality,' Hakomäki continues.

The Ministry of the Interior aims at making the province of North Karelia into the developer and 'spearhead of the information society laboratory'. This unique cross-administrative collaboration will strongly direct the further development and implementation of North Karelia’s information society strategy.

'The North Karelia provincial network is a service platform for networked functions and services available via different terminal devices,' describes Project Director, Mr. Esa Pulkkinen. 'We are building a web solution for nineteen municipalities and six federations of municipalities. In addition, we are acquiring and developing shared information systems that comprise both the administration’s internal as well as the end users’ network services.' The network project is run by the North Karelia Educational Federation of Municipalities with the current project plan going up until the end of 2006.

'The first completed application was a generic local government solution initially used by the municipalities of Ilomantsi and Nurmes. This basic solution is built according to the JHS recommendations, and can easily be implemented in all of the region’s municipalities and federations of municipalities,' says Project Manager Mr. Tarmo Sotikov of the North Karelia Educational Federation of Municipalities.

'We chose Teamware to create the portal and web solution. They offer real insight on the transformation of public services from functions into processes, and they have the right kind of platforms and tools to do it. So far, public services on the web have been extremely administration centric. However, up to 70 % of the usage of these services is information search. Thus, we must be able to create an offering covering the different public administration layers, where the customer can find a solution to the issue or need in question,' concludes Sotikov.

The North Karelia web solution is based on the Teamware Pl@za® environment for local government. North Karelia Educational Federation of Municipalities and the municipalities of Nurmes and Ilomantsi have long been users of the Teamware Office™ e-mail system, and they can now utilize it also in the new portal environment. In the future, new mobile services will guarantee the multi-channel availability of services through various networks.