Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Tamlyn Shimizu: Welcome to Smart in the City, the BABLE podcast, where we bring together top actors in the smart city arena, sparking dialogues and interactions around the stakeholders and themes most prevalent for today's citizens and tomorrow's generations. I am your host, Tamlin Shimizu, and I hope you'll enjoy this episode and gain knowledge and connections to accelerate the change for a better urban life.
So welcome back to another episode of Smart in the City. We are headed up north for this episode to an amazing place called Iceland. Most of us want to travel there there, but I think after I speak with the following guests, I will also be incredibly inspired by the innovative work that the city is doing. I won't keep you too much longer from the guest, but I also want to mention that the guest is a member of Urban Innovators Global, of which BABLE is also a part of, and which I encourage you to also get involved in. And that's how we know each other. So without further ado, I'd love to introduce you to Óskar J. Sandholt. He's the director of service and innovation at the city of Reykjavik. Welcome, Óskar.
[00:01:03] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Hi. Thank you.
[00:01:04] Tamlyn Shimizu: Thank you so much for coming on to get us started. I always like to start us off with a bit of a teaser question and we have an oldie but a goldie for you. Basically this oldie teaser is if the city of Reykjavik were an animal, which animal would it.
[00:01:26] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Yeah, it's a trick question, isn't it?
Well, the first thing that comes to mind is actually Homo sapiens. Is that considered animal in general?
[00:01:36] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah. Technically we are animals. Right?
[00:01:39] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: So yeah, so my first thought would be Homo sapiens because most Homo sapiens reflect what we want to stand for, kindness, care for individuals, culture and intelligence.
But if that doesn't count, I have.
[00:01:56] Tamlyn Shimizu: Other animals name, but I think it counts. But you have another animal at the top of your mind, then you can feel free to mention it.
[00:02:05] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Yeah. We also could compare it to the Icelandic horse. I don't know if you know that it's. It's a kind of a special. Yeah, let's say special horse. The special thing about it is that it is really, really tame and it has five ways of walking. And the fifth, which is unique for the Icelandic horse, is that it's so that it can basically run without the person who is sitting on it moving so you can drink your beer glass without spilling when it's running. And that is kind of reflecting also what we are trying to do towards our citizens to make them comfortable, to make them natural and like having Everything flowing.
[00:02:45] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah. Even when things are moving around them, you're still like in. In trying to. Mode. Yeah.
[00:02:53] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Yes. Trying to have everything in A level and going.
[00:02:55] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, very good, Very good answers. I've never had anyone respond with Homo sapiens also, so that's unique. So wonderful. So now I would love to get to know you as a person a bit more. I want to know a bit about your background, really, what led you into your role today. What. Where did you come from?
[00:03:19] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Yeah, it's obviously a long journey. I am. I am not a very young person anymore, but I don't consider myself old either. But originally I actually come from social sciences. I originally studied psychology and sociology and a little bit later I went into like the governance of public institutions and public mergers also.
From there I went into finance and operations.
And in the 80s, late 80s, very, very long ago, like 1987 or something like that, I actually got to ignore the Internet and it was like a complete love at first sight. And since then I have basically been obsessed with technology.
So I have not a formal training in technology in any way, even if I have worked in technology my whole life. But I basically know technology and it all comes from the start where you just. In the 80s, you got absorbed into all these fun things. So yeah, it was really good. So in all my jobs, I have had a few over my life. I usually go from the private sector to the public sector and from the public sector to the private sector or into my own company and stuff like that.
So now I'm in the. In the public sector.
Before that I was in my own company.
So in what. What you can also say that led me here without going into too much detail, because it's maybe not the most interesting is I in. In the early 2000s and I. I worked for a municipality here in the capital area in Iceland.
And at that point it was very difficult to get good data connections in. In this municipality. It was kind of a wealthy municipality and is still.
And I was working there as a. As an IT manager with. With something else also. And the mayor asked me if I could resolve this for the. For the municipality. It's. It's not a big municipality. It's. It's only around five or six thousand inhabitants.
So I spoke to the, to the telcos and they say, yeah, we will, we will. We will lay fiber. This was when Piper was really hitting it off.
We will lay viper in time. And we said, when will that be? Well, when it's necessary. And then we asked, when is it going to Be necessary? Yeah, we don't know yet. But to cut this short story short also we had like Reykjavik Energy actually had formed a company called Reykjavik Fiber, who was laying also fiber everywhere. So we managed to make a competition and have like parties bidding for laying fiber in the municipality. And it ended up that we got 100% fiber to the home in the whole municipality, into every apartment, every house, every entity, every company.
And that was in 2006, I think. And we became one of the first 100% fiber to the home municipalities in Europe, actually. And we got this for free because we managed to make them go against each other.
And when you are in fiber, you are basically hooked. That's where I got to know a lot of the people I now know in the urban innovators through the Fyper. And then I moved to the Netherlands. But I just started my own consultancy. And in the back of my head I always had thought about maybe working for Reykjavik one day. And I thought maybe it would be nice to be the CIO of reykjavik.
And in 2012 we had a very interesting mayor working for Reykjavik. I don't know if you followed it. He was a comedian, John Knard he was called. He basically won the city in 2010 with endless people. You had the bass player from a death metal band who was one of the chair members. You had people from the Sugar Cubes working in the government. So I really wanted to work with him. In 2012 there was a job opening. I was living in the Netherlands at this time.
It was for the service and operations of the city.
I applied and I got a job and accidentally the whole IT department was there. So I became the CIO of Reykjavik, which was nice. And then in 2019 the city went through an organizational change. And that was like a really big change. And that's when the Department of Service and Innovation was formed.
And that was quite.
It actually raised a lot of attention. Because what happened, or I think it was not, we didn't find any other examples. At least for the first time, at least in the Nordics, a department who had technology and service at the core was at the top of the organizational chart.
We also got all the money. So we started basically transforming the city. We were set up as a transformative powerhouse.
Since then Covid came, of course, 2020, and that is when the city decided to invest even further in technology.
We got a bunch of money. We got 10 billion Icelandic kronos, which is quite substantial money for Iceland.
And that started the transformation of the services of the city, because we Always think about the user. We don't think about technology. Basically we think about the user. So we have been building this up since then and since 2021 when they started, we have finalized just around 300 projects and we have completely like changed the city. It's an ongoing project. Of course we are still on it, but we have completely transformed the services of the city. We are now not like a traditional IT run, public sector like unit. We now have everything is. We talk about products and we have products, product managers and product owners. So we are developing the whole infrastructure in that way.
And it happens also that because we always think about the user and how the user is going to experience the service because technology without servicing people is useless in our opinion.
We are actually the biggest employer of service designers in Iceland.
A lot of service designers start their career here and then move on to other companies, etc.
This is the short version. I'm sorry.
[00:10:39] Tamlyn Shimizu: No, it's a really, really fascinating journey. So thank you so much for sharing and I think that sets the background and backdrop perfectly for our next discussions on kind of diving into some more of the initiatives and the projects that, you know, briefly mentioned.
So Reykjavik has undergone this remarkable journey that you just explained.
You established things like iTeam. Can you share the moments and lessons learned from this process? I believe that was in collaboration with Bloomberg as well.
[00:11:12] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Yes. Yeah. The ITEAM came to us in after, in 2019 when this organizational change was like finished that like I said rose or like awoke a lot of attention. And one of the units that noticed it was Bloomberg philanthropies. So they invited us for a training in Harvard for digital leadership. So two of us went there.
It started on the 8th of January in 2020. It was supposed to be constant meetings in London and everywhere. We flew to London on January 8th and that was the only time because Covid hit in February and we finalized the rest through a screen. But it was really, really good and we got, we applied for grants to, to support our journey. Then we, we were actually drawing up this, this investment journey that we were going into.
And we were two of the two Europe, one of two European cities that got the grant. Amsterdam was the other one. And this was in 2021 or so where it became actionable in 2021. This was a three year grant, two and a half million dollars that we got from them that could also further support our journey. And the I team is basically funded off through this grant so we could hire like people that we could never hire for tax money. We hired an artist that was actually a requirement who helped us visualizing everything. It was really, really unbelievable to work with her. We hired like, I don't know the English word for it, but like basically a behavior scientist who was trying to predict how the behavior would change with changing like services.
And we hired data, data people and more through this. And then we, we finalized three like big projects that were funded with this grant also.
[00:13:39] Tamlyn Shimizu: And yeah, that sounds really interesting. I have a quick follow up to that because I'm just wondering, you mentioned that these are, you know, these are people that you could never actually hire with tax money. From your perception, should we be able to hire those types of rules, would this be beneficial to expand kind of the, the ability to hire these more abstract roles into city government?
[00:14:07] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: It is like a, it is a difficult question because when you are, when you have tax money, you really have to think about what you're doing. I mean you have to do it in the private sector also, but it's a different concept. So normally if you would want to try to like experience with an artist, for example, you would maybe contract somebody for a shorter time.
But we could actually hire one in like not full, not 100%, but 70% for three years. And having this individual working with us completely made a new like dynamics into all the projects we did, made them better. But it, it, we could not. It would be very difficult for us to say, go and say we want to hire an artist because we think it's going to benefit us.
Maybe now, maybe now I could say, yeah, based on our experience, I think it could be.
[00:15:10] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah. Now that you've kind of piloted it with other money, you could. Yeah. Justify it better. Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:17] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: It gives you a little bit of moral freedom to think differently. When you have grants, of course. I mean Bloomberg are very strict in following up on financial plans and everything. So there is no slack, slack there. I can tell you they are even stricter than the city, but still they listen to different kind of reasoning.
[00:15:34] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really interesting.
You were also part of a project that I think is quite interesting called A Better City for Children.
Can you tell us more about that project and the impact on improved outcomes for students in need?
[00:15:50] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Yeah, this is actually the first Bloomberg project also. So this was a Bloomberg funded project. It was quite substantial.
I think we took over 70, what do you call it, like processes and combined it into one process.
It's basically about a holistic approach to servicing children who need something else than just a regular schooling. They have some kind of a dyslexia or if they have temporary problems or have some disabilities or anything.
What we had found out or we knew actually that the whole. All these processes had been designed from within the system, with the perspective of the system.
So there was no holistic like overview of it. There were different departments in the city of Reykjavik servicing it was a. Department of Welfare was servicing some of it. Department of School and Leisure was servicing some of it. And then there were gray zones in between. Data didn't travel between the departments. There was no holistic overview of this.
So that was basically we made a complete journey. We made a user journey through this. And it was an unbelievable graph that came out. You can't imagine we had to display it like on a 10 meter wall because it was so complex.
But through this work we managed to change it. So everybody now has just one place to go to. There's one process that you apply through.
You follow your. Your application in your own like what you call it, your own area within the city of Reykjavik website.
And data doesn't get lost. You don't have to get data and work between institutions with it. The data travels between or information travels between institutions. And now in the beginning of this year we are actually finalizing or the. Or not finalizing let's say because this is all these products are always evolving. Now we are implementing what we call a digital personal folder for children.
So from now on each child has a personal digital personal folder where all his like information, all reports and stuff is collected into. So all, all the case workers basically have know the history, don't have to go through all the hoops every time you need to apply for. That's how it was. If you applied for somebody to assist you because you had a speech problem, you had to apply, you had to go through all the hoops. If then again you. You had had to apply for something else like a temporary assistance with something mental or something. You had to go through it again also. So now this is. And what we did also with this is to support initiative that the city had built which was kind of a like a.
Let's say like a middle layer between the departments. So now that middle layer has all these tools and all the social workers that work with children and work even if they are in the department of Welfare or in school and leisure, they now all work together and they work on location in the schools, not in some kind of an institution that you have to go and wait in the living room or waiting room etc. Etc. So it's a completely transformed process for servicing children who need extra service. And I think it's a. Especially a good project because it's enough that you have problems in your life, isn't it? So you. We don't have to make it more difficult to get the help you need.
[00:20:17] Tamlyn Shimizu: Absolutely. I can say this as a citizen myself. We've all, you know, we've all been in those situations where you just want to like get this application done or. And it's so complicated. So those streamlining of processes really make a big difference for citizens. I believe so. Thank you for sharing. Can you share also a bit about Iceland's Prosperity act and the legislative framework that goes into that?
Can you share about that?
[00:20:49] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Yeah, that is related to this project, of course, because I know talking about law is not very entertaining, but the. The idea in these laws which were. I think they were from2017, I think or something like that. They're. They are rather new. They were basically meant to tackle the silos between state and municipalities. Because we have. In Iceland we have, for example hospitals and healthcare is run by the state, while schools and kindergartens and welfare is run by the municipalities.
So there is also one extra silo to tackle basically. So the Prosperity act was supposed to like force almost these actors to work together.
But what the better city for children extra is that it's digital.
The Prosperity act is analog. Basically it just says that you have to do this and you have to do this. You have to make it easier to do this and make. And to do this. But the Prosperity act, we used it a lot to. To like let's say inspire people to. To. To join the journey to change the. Or to make the better city for children as to be a reality. Because not all people want to change the way they work.
[00:22:27] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, so true.
What do you think that other cities can learn from this integration of policy and innovation at this scale?
[00:22:38] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: I think in general, I mean if cities or countries are looking have this problem, I don't know. This is of course different I think between countries. But how. How we service. I mean, I think in. For example in the other Nordics, I think some of the healthcare is also run by the municipalities. So there can be extra layers of complexity or not.
But I think if what they can take out of it is first service delivery is about the user, it's not about the system. It doesn't matter how we decide to have the system to have. If the state is going to service part of it and municipality other doesn't matter. The user doesn't care about it, it just wants to have service, he wants to have good service.
So the people that work in the system basically have to understand that the user side is what should win in this, in this battle. So removing friction using the law and digital transformation in removing friction from delicate services is something people could learn if they study the law and then the project.
[00:23:58] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, good take there. I want to mention. So digital transformation, we can't talk about anything right now without talking about generative AI, of course.
And this is. It can be a transformative tool, of course, for city governments. From your experience with Bloomberg City Lab and other experiences that you have, what challenges do you think Reykjavik is facing in adopting generative AI? And also thinking about like the project that you just were talking about, a better city for children, how might that integrate into existing projects?
[00:24:37] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Well, I mean, I don't think we do anything today or nothing that we do is not affected by some kind of an AI. Everything I think is, I think we can just. I mean AI is a general purpose technology and it's going to be integrated into everything just as software or like whatever you call it, like, just like Windows and all that stuff. The challenges we are facing at the moment is that. I don't know if you're familiar with Gartner Hype Cycles.
Have you seen that Gartner Group as American, like Gardener Co. Yeah, they make this hyper.
So they make this loop and the technologies, they move, they all go into a peak or inflation and then they move and they mature and they become like usable basically.
If you look at the Carson prediction now for AI, almost all of these technologies are just on the peak of inflated expectations.
So they are. Very few are matured. I think computer vision is matured and something like that. But they still have to move there. And especially if, I mean generative AI is then a special kind of a beast, I think because generative AI is generative and it makes stuff that.
Yeah, you sometimes don't understand how it makes stuff. And I don't even think the people who make the generative AI tools understand how generative AI comes to conclusions. I really, I really think it's like that. So. But again, we have to use this because this is a really powerful tool.
So I mean, we are in Europe where we usually regulate everything before we start using it. And I think that is happening with the AI and that kills a lot of like innovation. Yeah, yes, innovation and like momentum. In America, they. They regulate only if. If everything is hitting the fan. If the.
[00:26:56] Tamlyn Shimizu: If when everything's going wrong, then comes the regulation?
[00:27:00] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Yeah. Then they might regulate it. So I think we have to be there somewhere in between, basically. So. So we have started using it where it's applicable. I mean, we of course already use a lot of what we call robo workforce, which is not generative AI per se, it's just AI.
So we just make it do a lot of tasks that nobody wants to do.
When somebody asks for documents regarding their property that's automatically just assembled and sent out as an email, etc. Etc.
We do it with a lot of very boring tasks that take a lot of time. But that is not generative. The generative AI we use at the moment more.
If you look at the large language models, which is like OpenAI or chat TTP and that stuff, we use it as secretaries at the moment. So it's very good for us to.
I mean, we are now implementing a project with City Lawyer.
So there we are actually training what we call a small language model. We're training a small language model on or it's a company doing it on all sentences and everything, all law.
So that the lawyers at City, the lawyer can ask the small language model and they are pretty certain that they will get correct answers. We are doing the same for the data of the city. We are making our own small language model. And I think all cities should do this and I think a lot of companies are going to do it also because that makes it so that we firstly, we have to discipline ourselves to make our data very good and correct.
And when you have trained this small language model, the first benefit you get is that you can use it for a lot of things. You can use it when answering citizens about inquiries. You can use it when you write letters. You can use it if you want to have a chatbot on your website instead of a human, which we don't have at the moment because everybody hates bad chatbots. And we are not convinced at the moment that our chatbot is good enough. But it will be with this language model.
Then again also if you train it and you are using it, you will also see if your data is good or not because you will quickly spot errors in answers and stuff like that.
So at the moment they use. We are usage. We see for this, but I think it's very. And we are encouraging staff to use this.
And now in April, Iceland actually managed to get into Microsoft.
Our minister last year went to Microsoft and convinced them to have Icelandic in copilot.
So in April I hear that Icelandic will be included in copilot. So then we can also use it to summarize meetings and do everything that the English speaking people can do already with Copilot. And this is, this is gonna.
I don't know if it's gonna save us a lot of money necessarily, but it's gonna make the lives of people much easier at the moment. So I think we have to.
I think generative AI, you cannot only think about it in the terms of how much money you're going to save. You have to think about the value it can add basically to your job or to your.
[00:30:57] Tamlyn Shimizu: To your products and, and the efficiency gains. No, yeah, yeah.
[00:31:03] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: But in my. My feeling is because I use it myself. Okay. So I don't have a secretary. Nobody has a secretary in Iceland anymore. It's like obsolete. So I use it as my secretary. I ask it a lot of questions and I ask it to. If I now need to write a LinkedIn post that is done by the AI, it can make a draft of my emails and stuff like that. And when Copilot will have Icelandic, I can like I say, ask it to just summarize the meetings, take action points out of the meetings. It's like having a secretary, basically.
If I'm gonna do more, I'm not sure about that, but I might have an easier life.
[00:31:45] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, we'll see.
[00:31:48] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: I don't know, maybe I will do more.
[00:31:49] Tamlyn Shimizu: It's a transformative time and a lot of questions still up in the air with it. So yeah, I'm excited to see though where it goes. Definitely with some caution also involved, of course.
You mentioned to me this chargeback model that I wanted to ask you about.
It's to recover costs for digital transformation project.
Can you explain how this model works and the challenges with implementing it?
[00:32:19] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Yes.
We are implementing, starting from this January, a Charles park model for the departments and everybody who uses our services.
So we are set up like that, that we control all the money that goes into it. And digital.
We have digital leaders in all departments where they are there to scout the needs for transformation or what services the departments want to transform.
That comes to us and we have a model that is going to prioritize most important projects based on profit, based on how many users going to benefit, etc. Etc.
This is a little bit of a bookkeeping talking. So this is like an investment.
So we invest in products that we make or buy and implement.
We pay that and we write that off in three to five years. We take care of that so the departments don't have to worry about raising that money.
We had it before like that, the departments had to get the money and that didn't work because they didn't get any money and nothing worked. And then when they got the money, they used it for something else. So this has been working magic. That is why we have been doing 300 projects in the past three years, three or four years. So what we are now doing is when you have implemented a product, let's say financial aid, you have done the minimal viable product, you have invested in that, that is functioning, you have implemented it, people are starting to use it.
Then we move it from investment into what we call just the budget.
And from then the departments, they have to pay us hosting running of the software, but also product, the product management of IT and development.
And they also pay us necessary lawyers. We need for the GTPR service designers that we need to develop the products and to make the investment profitable. Basically, if then something happens and we need to make a substantial change to the product, then we might move it into investment phase again and then back. So now, starting from last year, basically late last year, now when we make a proposal that we go to departments with the financial director or the director of the department has to confirm that he's willing to pay basically the cost, the running cost of it with the project management and all that comes with it into the future. If he doesn't want to do that, we don't do the project.
So we are moving from this around 1 to 2 billion isolated Kronos out of investment per year into the budget. And we are taking that out of the budget of the departments.
[00:35:49] Tamlyn Shimizu: Really interesting.
[00:35:50] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Which is transformational. Yeah, it's a transformation, I can tell you. And because that means that the budget of the city is not expanding as much. Because if you are just going to expand the expenses that digital makes, that is difficult. We cannot kind of, I don't, I don't want to phrase it too badly, but we make the departments find the fat layer. Because if you implement, if I say like the financial aid again, we. That was a very complex process.
We made an app that solves that.
The process before was done by 20 people, five places in the city, five different methods after the app was made. And it took like four weeks for the applicant to apply and to get an answer.
After the app, six people are doing this same job and it takes 10 minutes to apply and you get an answer within 24 hours.
The we did not lay off the 17 people or they did not lay off the. The 12 people, I mean, or 14 people. That was free. But they actually can now these were all like social workers with five years of university. They are now servicing actual people instead of pushing paper around so we could.
But then again they have to now run it. So they needed also to minimize a little bit the stuff holdings or stop buying expensive coffee or something. I don't know. Because they have to pay us the running of this. But this has not been painless, I can tell you.
We are not the most popular unit in the city at the moment.
[00:37:51] Tamlyn Shimizu: Why do you think, do you think that the departments come around where they see the benefit of it in the long run? Or is this like. Like this is like a long process where the beginning is really painful and then eventually everyone comes on board?
[00:38:10] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: I think it's actually going to catch on pretty rather quickly because this was unusual. Now we are implementing the past years basically into their budgets, but from now on they have to sign for every project going to be made. But what it does also is that it puts a little bit of a lid on the demand because we have, we have 10 meters of, of projects from each department that they want to do. And some of the projects we say why? Why do we want to do this? I mean, what, what are you going to gain with it? So this is also going to like kind of what you say, take those less necessary projects and make the director think, do I really need this? There was a lot of demand, for example, for all sorts of, what do you call it in English, like graphs showing some process that our data data team had to like work on. We said, well, why do you want to show this? What is the purpose? So now if you demand a graph or something like that that you want to display, you have to pay for it. So you have to really think about is this worth it for my department to have this information into this plan?
It's going to form a little bit of demand. It's going to make it more like. Basically, I think it's going to tamper the demand a little bit and it's going to also even increase the transparency in everything that we do. Because it's completely. If you think about any department in the city, maybe the department that is doing the roads, they just hire people that they think they need and they need, but nobody knows why they need it. We actually explain why we hire designers, lawyers, and we tell them how much they are paying for each one of them. So it's completely transparent. And if the demand is low, we will minimize the team. If the demand is high, we can expand it.
So that is like kind of A dynamism that I have not seen in many public sector.
[00:40:33] Tamlyn Shimizu: I've never heard of this before and I talked to a lot of different people. That doesn't mean to say it doesn't exist of course, but yeah, it sounds very innovative model. Really interested to also talk to you a little bit more like next year and see how that progresses as well and that transformation. I also want to mention that last year you won the 2024 Seoul Smart City Gold award in the Tech Innova City category, if I'm correct, which is a significant achievement. Congratulations.
And I wanted to ask you what were really like the key factors in this recognition and what is really the benefit of winning these awards and how can you, you know, create more impact from it?
[00:41:24] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Yeah, well, why we won it, I can only refer to what the Koreans said that the, the judges said that this was a remarkable product. It was the better city for children actually process that wanted. And they said it was just basically remarkably well done and very easy to understand the benefit of it. And it was putting service very high in the prioritization, etc. Etc. So they were actually very. I was not insult myself, but our assistant mayor went there and they were actually really impressed with it, with the quality of it. What it means for us. I mean awards are always useless unless you get them yourself. I mean if you miss an award, you're always like yeah, but if you get it, it's nice.
So. But what it means to us, what is make it useful for us is firstly, we are now connected in a network that is around this and we will be invited for some training this year and more from. From the people in Seoul.
We also are invited to display it in the next or this year's ceremony. Also, it's also just very nice to get the recognition about the work we have been doing because even if it sounds very easy when I'm describing this, the past years have been really.
[00:43:04] Tamlyn Shimizu: It doesn't sound easy to me, but.
[00:43:07] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Yeah, no, because what I mean is that I. We are working in a world that a lot of people don't understand. They think you can just buy something and say and then the problem is solved. While the main problem of implementing digital transformation is changing the way we work.
[00:43:25] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah.
[00:43:26] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: And redesigning the process for the user technology is the easy part because it's very complex. It's so easy to criticize.
And a lot of politicians in the minority have been criticizing us heavily because it's a lot of money. The city invested a lot of money in it.
But we have Completely transformed everything with the money. So they are seeing this and to get this recognition on top of it, it's just really valuable to kind of show that we are not.
We are not only from the countryside in Iceland. We also can do work that is recognized internationally. So the Bloomberg recognition and this has made us like or strengthen us a lot.
[00:44:10] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really good points there.
I want to get a little bit more into this digital transformation, as you said. Sorry, let me do that again because the door opened.
I want to get a little bit more into the digital transformation. We've talked a lot about positive outcomes from it. But I also want to get your thoughts on how can we transform without creating new barriers, Especially when you're thinking about the user, the marginalized users, the users that aren't so digitally savvy, let's say, how can we not inadvertently create new barriers for these people?
[00:44:55] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: It's a very, very, very good question and it is something we are always thinking about because this, this happens actually if you're not careful. And we are probably guilty of, of having done this because it's so easy for us to forget people who have different needs from ourselves. But we try to be really conscious about this and I think we have managed to, let's say, escape it mostly because of the method we use. So we are heavily invested in the user experience.
Before we start any project, we do a user research and we form a focus group where we make.
What is it called in English? It's called archetypes, I think like archetypes. Isn't it an English word? So we. Yeah, so we make, we sit down and the designers, they think and the people who are on the service they display, what are our, like not only common types, but our customers, how are they.
That can be. For example, when we were designing, I don't remember what service it was, but then we had an archetype that had like one. Disabled children, an elderly mother, they were taken care of, etc. Etc. And we tried to use these archetypes. They are actually standing here around and we make like a big figures of them so they become a little bit alive. And you. We try to with users, to go through the path with them, what is going to meet them.
So we, we create a user journey basically before we start designing the products themselves.
After the user journey, we remake the processes internally because people who work for the city are also users. They need systems to work in.
So when we have done the customer journey and we have pinpointed the pain points and seen what is good etc. Then we basically start. So we are very froth heavy in our work. We use a lot of time to prepare and that has actually this like what it has gained us is that a very, very few projects have failed with us. I think we have maybe failed 10 projects or something like that. We have just said we can abandon this because it's not going to work. And in it that is not a high percentage.
[00:47:36] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, yeah. That's a very, very low percentage also for public sector, like innovative projects, anything like that. That's a very low percentage.
[00:47:43] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: So yeah, so we're always thinking about service. What is the user thinking? And that we kind of have minimized this friction also because our website is of course the service portal. Also we have a specialist here that is actually we have all. Our website is machine translatable. So we have gone through all of the material in the website and it's a huge website I can tell you. And it's written now so an 8 year old Icelandic person can understand it and it's written. So the same term is always used in for the same idea, if you understand what I mean. Service can have different names when we are talking about it, but it's always called the same word. And so we have then made a translation of that term. So if you translate Iceland, the Icelandic website into English you will get 98% and from there you can translate basically into every other language because we have a lot of. Of course there are 130 languages spoken here or something like that.
[00:48:56] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah. Wow.
[00:48:57] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: A lot of.
And the same as with accessibility. Our website is accessible for people with disabilities and then we have service centers still like manual. So if you cannot do this, you can call in like a video call or you can show up and you will be helped through the process.
[00:49:24] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really, really good points there. And I like your focus on this front. Heavy work as you said.
So I also want to ask you, moving now, we're at the beginning, we're recording this at the beginning of 2025 really. We just entered into the new year and I'm wondering what challenges still stand of like in front of you. You've made like really great progress but I'm sure there are many, many challenges still in your way. What tools do you think you are missing and that you need to accelerate the change that you're aiming for.
[00:50:00] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: I'm not sure we are missing any tools except money.
[00:50:05] Tamlyn Shimizu: Money? Yeah.
[00:50:09] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Money and skilled people. It's these two, like materials are the most important ones in everything.
So as we stand now in the beginning of 2025 we have actually changed our IT and service IT services from being like spaghetti, traditional spaghetti it into like product streams. So we have welfare products, we have financial products, we have school and leisure products and we have environment and building products.
And what is now ahead of us is just to continue developing because of course we, we have. And I mean digital transformation is a digital journey. It's not going to end anytime soon at least and when it ends something else is gonna, the AI is gonna catch on. Etc, etc. So we have endless projects to. To finalize and. But it we have at least managed in these years with this heavy investing to take or make everything like going into these dreams. And what we see now ahead of us is that we want or we are starting that actually now a discussion with. I mean Iceland is not a big country, it's a very small country. So this, the vision here is that you can go to Iceland is. And you can have all public service there. So what we are now capable of doing is to start merging our service pages.
I don't know the English word for this. It's like the page. It's your area, your user area. You know, where you have all the information.
[00:51:59] Tamlyn Shimizu: User profile or user. Yeah, something the inner portal, right?
[00:52:05] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Yeah, yeah, you have, you have your invoices, you have your applications, etc. Your history. So we are starting to merge that with Iceland is the first municipality who is capable of doing that.
So to support this future that you don't have to understand where you live, if you live in COPA or Reykjavik or whatever. These are all municipalities in the same area and when you move between them you don't want to experience different type of services.
So we are starting to merge that.
The reason we are doing it also is that it's going to save us to. We can stop developing the front end and we can just continue developing the backend.
And Iceland is going on. Iceland is going to develop the front end. That is a big project we are going into. We are also actually in discussion with the consortia of municipalities in Iceland and the Icelandic state government in possibly forming a public project office where we actually would mirror our operations. Because in all modesty, I have to say Reykjavik is the most developed digitally in Iceland, even more developed than the Icelandic state. And it's only because we have invested in it.
So we. There is like interest in maybe mirroring this into a cross sectoring public project office where digital transformation is then done on the level that it covers everything.
So you only have to. You can basically then do the front end. You can do the technology solution. You can usually make at least the blueprint of the process that's going to change. And then each municipality or government institution has to connect it to the systems of record and to their maybe payment systems and also adjust a little bit for how they are going to work.
But that is also because we have a lot of processes that go between.
If you want to apply, for example for a restaurant in Reykjavik, you are in some kind of, I don't know, like a limbo between the state and the. And the city. You have to go to the police. Police is state wise. You have to go to the city for the health stuff. So there could be a lot of benefit in this. So this is kind of the journey we are looking at besides developing everything this year at least. Yeah. This year we are going to focus also on. We're going to take a little bit of a breath, implement the charts back. It's going to be a lot of work and a little bit try to breathe a little bit and see plan the future. But this is on the radar at least.
[00:55:20] Tamlyn Shimizu: Interesting horizons for sure for Reykjavik.
With that I come to the end of our main interview part. It's really been interesting to explore with you all the different initiatives and projects and models and everything that you're doing. So thank you so much. Now we get to play a little bit. We get to go into one of our fun segments.
And the segment that I've chosen for you today is my favorite segment. It still remains my favorite segment. It's called roll with the punches. It's where you answer this or that questions with your first instinct. So we'll just run through it really fast and then if you want to explain any of your answers, you can do so at the end.
Are you ready?
[00:56:05] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: I think so. Good.
[00:56:08] Tamlyn Shimizu: Okay. Winter or summer?
[00:56:12] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Summer.
[00:56:13] Tamlyn Shimizu: Always real time data or predictive analytics.
Think I was saying real time real time data. Okay. Open data or secure data?
[00:56:28] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Open data can't be secure. So I would go for open.
Open data makes the opportunity for other people to make something valuable.
[00:56:39] Tamlyn Shimizu: Small scale pilot projects or citywide rollouts?
[00:56:45] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Always small scale.
[00:56:46] Tamlyn Shimizu: First local solutions or global best practices.
It's meant to. We trick you a bit.
[00:56:59] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Oh well. We always look at global.
[00:57:02] Tamlyn Shimizu: Global first. Good. Innovation for efficiency or inclusivity.
Innovation for efficiency or inclusivity.
[00:57:17] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: I think we would prioritize inclusivity here.
[00:57:20] Tamlyn Shimizu: In re citizen participation or expert driven planning?
[00:57:28] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: We also prefer citizen participation.
[00:57:31] Tamlyn Shimizu: Northern lights or midnight sun?
[00:57:36] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: I like the midnight sun.
[00:57:38] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, you're the summer.
[00:57:39] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: I'm born in the wrong country probably. Yeah.
[00:57:41] Tamlyn Shimizu: I spent some time in Alaska and I've gotten to experience the northern lights and the midnight sun and I really love the midnight sun too. You can, you feel like you can do anything like all times of the day.
[00:57:53] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Yeah. So it's, you're so like energy.
[00:57:56] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yes, absolutely.
Can also screw up your sleeping patterns a bit, but. Yeah, yeah, very good. Do you want to explain any other answers? I think, I think you explained a little bit during so. But do you want to elaborate at all?
[00:58:13] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Yeah, I don't know. I mean some of these were like something you would say.
[00:58:16] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yes.
[00:58:19] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Most of them probably. I mean, I don't know. I mean we have this actually rule about. For example when you talked about in house or global, we always start checking the global. If it's not going to work, we check. If we have, we actually start checking if we have something in that we have been using we can use, then we check the market. If not, we design our own because we have found a little bit out that over reliance on shelf products is in today's environment, not always good.
Today you can actually do better with, especially with generative AI actually if you make your own and you just make the generative AI document the code and you release it into GitHub and anybody can just, we can have different programmers helping us later, etc. Etc. So, so what we see in my opinion we see now a like a recline or decline from these huge programs. Like we are using SAP at the moment for like payments or like wages. I think we are going out of there because we now want the collection of small agile programs that can actually just be integrated into something like web methods or something like that.
[00:59:58] Tamlyn Shimizu: Interesting. Yeah, thank you. So with that we go to our final question. This is a question we ask every single guest and it is to you, what is a smart city?
Yeah, it's a difficult one.
[01:00:17] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: No, no, it's not difficult because I don't know if I can say what I think actually I have a very low tolerance for smart cities. In my opinion, smart cities or smart city concept is completely, and it alienates me a little bit and the reason is that I know that smart city is gonna, they're gonna live. And, and, and so I just explained it today smart cities are of course, let's say human centric cities. Basically they are smart in my opinion. But what's what a smart city concept has in, in the last 20 years always more and more become like more and more displaying Technology instead of, instead of human. The service.
Yeah, like technology for technology sake, basically. Because there are lots of possibilities.
But sometimes if you go to like some of these Smart City conferences and you look at what they're displaying and say, why do I want to do this? What is going to benefit? I mean we, we did our demos ourselves. We once everybody was thinking about Smart Lightning and we had a. Luckily a shown that we tried that out in. So we had like this dimmable lights in a park here that was supposed to be cheaper to run and it was supposed to create better like quality of. Of like, like better experienced. You could see the star lights and stuff like that.
What the actual outcome was that women stopped going in there because they didn't feel secure because the light dim, of course lit up when they walked and dimmed behind them and they didn't feel.
[01:02:10] Tamlyn Shimizu: Secure, they like spotlighted them.
[01:02:12] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Didn't feel secure.
They spotlighted them and they had no idea what was ahead and what was behind. Yeah, so this was. Yeah, we have more, more of these. Like.
Yeah, Smart City is a city that makes a human centric approach to technology and uses it like to benefit its users instead of benefiting some kind of techno or something.
[01:02:44] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really good, really good definition. So thank you for sharing with that. That's all we have today. We've gotten to really pick your brain about really interesting things. So thank you so much for coming on. I'm really inspired by your work. So thank you so much.
[01:03:03] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Thank you for having me and see you later.
[01:03:06] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, definitely. And thank you to also to all of our listeners. Don't forget you can always create a free account on BABLE SmartCities EU. You can find out more about different projects, solutions and implementations. Thank you very much.
[01:03:22] Óskar Jörgen Sandholt: Thank you.
