Published 13/12/2022
Making everyday life smoother in different life events has been the core of Suomi.fi, which was launched 20 years ago. Over the years, digital services have emerged alongside the service content. Today, Suomi.fi is an entity of digital service support services consisting of 11 different services.
The website, which crosses the organisational boundaries of public administration and is based on life events, was revolutionary from the outset. Suomi.fi was the famous “one stop” from where you would start to resolve something, if you did not know which agency the matter belonged to.
The precursor to Suomi.fi was a robust 400-page Citizen's Manual, the table of contents of which already largely resembled the structure of Suomi.fi's instructions. We were already using the latest technology in the 1990s. The Manual was also available as a "hyperbook" CD-ROM, floppy disks, and on the Telmo service.
Hyperlinks were, once, the peak of technology. In addition to the instructions on Suomi.fi', it contained links to all public administration and Finnish municipal services from Utsjoki to Hanko. It took three months for three civil servants to review and supplement the links of the entire country - and then they had to start again.
Nowadays, public administration and municipal service information is described in a decentralised manner in the Suomi.fi Finnish Service Catalogue, from which the data is utilised through its APIs in different services.
The vision at the head of developing the Suomi.fi Web Service is to support people in their everyday lives: from having a baby, becoming independent and entering the workforce, from family care and public guardianship to the death of a loved one; from planning, growth and, internationalisation of a company to changes of ownership.
A great deal of new events, such as data breaches and the coronavirus, have been included. AI-assisted services are also on their way, as the technical features of the AuroraAI network are introduced to Suomi.fi.
For organisations, the Suomi.fi family offers shared digital services. Suomi.fi enables them to provide secure communications, acting on behalf of another party, payment transactions, a service map and secure data transfer between organisations.
Quality tools, test materials and tools for developing the interoperability of glossaries, code sets and data models have been published to support the development of the services.
Suomi.fi has grown into a central part of Finland's national digital infrastructure, which is also of international interest. Suomi.fi services are visited by officials responsible for developing digital services, politicians and representatives of companies and international organisations around the world.