Municipal innovation in practice — KS, KS Digital and collaboration with the supplier market
Asbjørn Finstad, department director, KS on stage at Public World.
“KS is, after all, the membership organisation for all municipalities and county authorities,” explains Finstad, adding that “we work for the municipalities and county authorities in meetings with the state and parliament.” He highlights how digital services are now a precondition: “All (service areas) really have a digital imprint, or something digital to stand on.”
We talk about why KS Digital is built to deliver shared solutions at scale, and how concrete measures — such as standards, data exchange and good governance — make it possible for more municipalities to succeed simultaneously. Here Finstad points to collaboration and division of labour: “It may well be that we manage to set up good structures that make it possible to make more use of the resources out there.”
Asbjørn Finstad, Department Director, Department: FID Strategic ICT and Digitalisation at KS.
For the supplier market, the advice is clear: understand shared needs, attend supplier conferences, and document information security, data privacy and universal design. “We want everyone to understand the needs the sector has, where we are heading, and what the supplier market thinks about and recommends.”
We also touch on mature use of AI in municipal healthcare — particularly staffing and resource planning — and the need to raise security: “If you are small as a municipality, the time for standing alone is past.”
Finally, we discuss why shared solutions such as Svarut and a national support service for digital learning materials can deliver better scale, more uniform quality and faster rollout across the country.
The hosts are Jens Christian Bang and Dag Rustad, both with long experience in technology — and with experience as suppliers to public-sector organisations.
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