Page 21 - U4SSC Factsheet Ålesund, Norway, June 2020

Public Sector

Category KPI Result Performance to Benchmark SDG

Open Data Sets Published 119 No Benchmark Available

Open Data Sets 100.00 %
Availability

e-Government Services 80 No Benchmark Available

Public Sector
e-Procurement 84.92 %

While the role of e-governance as a building block to a true smart city has been emphasized by the UN,
research shows that there still exists a significant gap between large and small cities in their ability to
afford the digital infrastructure, platforms and software applications on which the public sector must rely
to deliver e-services. The gap is widespread and is be found in areas where the urban-rural divide is acute.
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Research also shows that many cities around the world still indicate the need for a more equitable provision
of services. E-governance and e-services are a natural solution to this need. The electronic services delivery
model leads to city spending that is based on evidence and is oriented toward results, thereby ensuring that
the city becomes broadly partnered, resident-involved, diversity-informed, smartly resourced, employee-
engaged and more data-driven. 9
All of Ålesund’s potential datasets are available publicly, which is considered very conducive to allowing
stakeholders and private businesses to review and build applications based on the open data sets. The
openness of a city’s data can be considered one of the key building blocks for the new digital economy.
The actual publication is done nationally at geonorge.no using most of the data provided by the region.
This is part of a private-public partnership between various entities called GeoVEKST that establishes and
maintains map data in Norway. The region still prepares the data and funds the effort, after which the
majority of the datasets are published by a national mapping authority or by other state actors. The same
state actors also prepare datasets for their own use, which cover the region and are also publicly available.
Optimizing public sector procurement: While it is on its way to achieving the benchmark, there is still
room for Ålesund to conduct 100 per cent of its public sector procurement activities electronically.
For the remaining 15 per cent of procurement opportunities that need to transition from paper to
e-procurement, it is recommended that the region also advertises them electronically through its
e-procurement portal, in order to register any remaining or new vendors and start providing electronic
notifications of addenda during the transition period. Procurement activities or opportunities should be
counted as fully electronic only once they are available online, require an online response and if any
information materials or applications/forms are not available for manual processing via municipal offices.
Ålesund may find ITU Recommendations such as Recommendation ITU-T Y.3600: ‘Big data standardization
roadmap’ particularly helpful when scaling the backend of its e-services and e-processes, along with
Recommendation ITU-T Y.4461: ‘Framework of open data in smart cities’ when expanding its open data
offerings.

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