CHALLENGE 

CROSSING THE UNCHARTED WATERS OF E-SERVICES

The Faroe Islands is an autonomous nation located in the Northern Atlantic Ocean, part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Heavily influenced by the Scandinavian model, the Faroe Islands government was lagging behind its neighbors when it came to digital service offerings.

With its highly-educated population, the islands' government took the opportunity to create the National Digitization Programme and set sail to enhance its citizen experience and reduce costs through digitizing services.

The problem was that the Faroe Islands are a small territory. With only 55,000 people, developers are scarce. "We needed a bunch of them," explained Janus Læarsson, Chief Architect of the National Digitization Programme. "So, we started looking at what was available in the market, beyond Java or .NET to do more with less in an accelerated time."

The Faroe Islands Are Taking the Citizen Experience Online

3:24

SOLUTION 

A CITIZEN PORTAL TO BRING GOVERNMENT, CITIZENS, AND BUSINESSES CLOSER

The goal of the National Digitization Programme was to deliver an e-service infrastructure that connects the government, municipalities, and local businesses with the islands' citizens in a better and more modern experience. To boost IT efficiency and ensure a sustainable project, the Faroe Islands' government decided to build its e-service infrastructure on top of three building blocks:

• A single eID for authentication and signature—Samleikin—with which Faroese citizens can access all the e-services available.
• Basic data, such as civil and business registry, land registry and cadastre, and geo data.
• X-Road platform—Heldin—Estonian platform that offers a secure and standardized way to transfer data between the public sector IT-systems.

The first application Nicolai and Janus' team delivered was a citizen portal that allows Faroese people to access everyday services from their desktop and mobile devices.

Today, Vangin integrates with 200+ services from over 30 service providers, including governmental and municipal entities. Faroe Islanders can do things like review their tax information and apply for benefits—a previously very manual process that included printing, signing, and scanning documents—from the comfort of their home. The portal also has a few features you may not expect from a citizen portal, like a family tree that Faroese Islanders can consult to trace back their ancestry to the 1200s.

The portal is widely utilized by citizens, with over 85% of eligible users having already signed in, and approximately 70,000 logins every month.

RESULTS 

A COMPOSABLE ARCHITECTURE TO SPEED UP AND FUTURE-PROOF DEVELOPMENT

Vangin has stepped up the game in how the Faroese government and businesses communicate with citizens. There are fewer calls to the service desk and errors in citizen information, and processes are managed more efficiently and more transparently, leading to an increased trust in the authorities.

When it comes to OutSystems, the platform enabled the Faroe Islands to set up a composable architecture that has sped up the development of new solutions. "One of the most successful and efficient development processes we had was our very popular National Digital Wallet," said Nicolai. "We were able to reuse components and integrations to third-party registries created for Vangin and developed Skjáttanin two months."

Another key feature of the platform that has enabled the small team at the Faroe Islands to launch new experiences with confidence is the out-of-the-box CI/CD capabilities.

Janus explained: "In a normal setup, you have people that are good at scripting, others on automation, on Docker—all these things that are part of a modern development project. With OutSystems, you have CI/CD in a box, so you can abstract all those things away and just focus on development and customer feedback. That's the most powerful thing about the platform."

For the future, the National Digitization Programme will continue to use OutSystems as its primary development platform. The team is about to launch a business registry app and is currently working on a new app for tax authorities.