Culture and mindset are the most important things.

Time needs to be taken to find the right people who are passionate about digital matters and transformation. This group can work with you as ambassadors for the project, becoming key people in building larger teams, transforming processes, assisting with strategy formulation and prioritising tasks.

At Hafnarfjörður municipality, it can be said that all the council's employees are, in effect, part of the team, or at least have the opportunity to be so, to voice their opinions or to get involved in individual projects. Likewise, it is important to hear the voices of residents and other users of the service. In the case of a local authority, cooperation between authorities has probably been the most important factor in implementing digital transformations.

Have an interest in staff projects

To succeed, you therefore need to have people on your side. One of the best ways to achieve this is to take an interest in your staff and their projects.

Education is important. Many fear the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution. Many of the jobs that exist today, or have existed in recent years, have either disappeared or will disappear. Banking staff know this reality from first-hand experience. But this revolution can also have a very positive impact on people's working environments and increase job satisfaction.

At the start of the digital transformation at the City of Hafnarfjörður, we brought a large group of staff together in workshops to shape new service priorities. We educated them about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, asked for ideas on digital opportunities and asked people to prioritise projects. The work was carried out across the council's departments so that staff gained a greater understanding of each other's roles and projects. Following this work, the departments appointed their digital leaders, whom we in the Service and Development Department can specifically turn to for assistance in implementing digital transformations.

It can be extremely frustrating for staff who may have a good education and make extensive use of technology in their daily lives, if they then find that their workplace has not changed its working practices for years, or even decades. It's bad to regularly hear the following sentence: „But we've always done it this way,“ and that could put off good people who didn't sign up for a job where a significant part of the role involves printing out documents, filing them in folders, photocopying and pasting, moving from Word to Excel, from Excel to some system.

Fortunately, there's little of that mindset at my workplace, i.e. wanting to always do things the way they were done. At least I don't notice it much. People are open to change and I'm sure the training, communication and active staff participation play a part in that. Much more often, I hear things like, „we don't want to do this this way any more“.

After working for nearly three years in a new role and a new field, what gives me the greatest satisfaction is when the staff themselves take the initiative with projects. When it is not me or my immediate team, but the staff themselves, who are pushing for changes to working practices.

A small project that brought joy

I would like to mention a small example. A few months ago, a department manager in social services approached me and asked if it would be possible to find a better solution than the one they currently have for residents' accounts at homes for the disabled.

They were working on the resident register in Excel spreadsheets, had to print out bank statements and enter them into Excel, the same working methods used in the last century, as the department manager put it.

The heads of households then submitted the accounts to the finance department at regular intervals for review and supervision. The household accounts were then entered into the accounting system by a member of staff from the finance department.

The department head wanted to move into the modern era and explore the possibility of getting a simple and inexpensive accounting system that could speed up the process and create links from the bank to the accounting system, thereby saving the managers work. She further detailed her requirements, including accessibility, data protection and security.

Armed with this information, we set about finding an accounting system that could support their needs. In a relatively short time, we found a suitable accounting system that met the criteria of being inexpensive, user-friendly, fillable online, having the necessary bank connections, and able to generate reports required for the households' accounts. The project required collaboration with the Data Protection Officer, the Head of the Development and IT Department, and staff from the Finance Directorate, as well as staff from the Family and Child Affairs Directorate. It did not take many meetings. Everyone understood the need and the benefits of the project.

This is an extremely small example, but it's so important and made a huge difference. Staff no longer feel like they are doing their jobs as if they were stuck in the 20th century; the system greatly speeds things up, simplifies staff life, and increases security, improving privacy, access controls and safety.

Although the project is not large in the grand scheme of things, it was so gratifying that it came entirely from the initiative of an employee who was no longer content to do things the way they had always been done. The seeds we have been sowing over the past few quarters are now sprouting digitally everywhere. The staff's mindset is changing, and with that, the digital sky's the limit for us!

Sigurjón Ólafsson, Director of the Service and Development Department