In Finland, the municipal authorities are responsible for providing citizens with a variety of social services varying from income support to child protection and elderly care. Local authorities have traditionally produced most of the social services themselves, but the percentage of private service production in commission of authorities is on the rise. On the other hand, the number of municipal authorities has lately diminished from 452 (year 2000) to 342 (2010). Social services are thus increasingly produced either in new municipal settings or by a growing number of private service providers.

ICT is widely adopted by social service providers. Client information systems are mainly tailored for each service provider, though, and interfaces between information systems are rare. Information models as well as document contents and structures differ significantly in diverse information systems. Consequently, information is not compatible or easily shareable between existing information systems of social care authorities. Efficient utilisation of client data in service production, as well as efficient information exchange between service providers, has been hampered as a result. Furthermore, client records do not provide high quality and comparable information for management or statistics.

National Project for IT in Social Services

In 2004 The Ministry of Social Affairs and Health initiated a project to develop the practices and technologies for client information management in social services. The underlying aim of the project was to improve the interoperability of client data in diverse information systems and nationally harmonise client data contents, semantics and structures.

In 2005, the harmonization of client data started with terminological work, information contents specification and core data definitions. The content of the project was thereafter expanded to cover all viewpoints of national enterprise architecture for social services.

The Finnish Government has developed an architecture framework for governmental organisations and municipal public authorities, based on open international and national specifications for enterprise architecture such as TOGAF. The framework consists of four viewpoints:

• Business Architecture,
• Data Architecture,
• Applications Architecture and
• Technology Architecture.

Enterprise architecture is planned in all viewpoints on three levels:

• public management on top level,
• domain level (such as social care) and
• organisational level.

The enterprise architecture specifications for social care (at domain level) were made by the National Project for IT in Social Services. This will help municipal authorities in their efforts of specifying their organisational enterprise architecture.

The project was completed at the end of the year 2011. After that, further development and maintenance of the achieved results are lead by a national operational unit that was founded in the beginning of 2011, as a part of the Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare.

Contact us:

Maarit Laaksonen
project manager 
maarit.laaksonen.2[at]thl.fi
Telephone: + 358 40 140 8389

Jarmo Kärki
project manager 
jarmo.karki[at]thl.fi
Telephone: + 358 20 610 7341