Virk.dk is a one-stop-shop portal delivering all business related forms, reportings and filings options from all public authorities in Denmark.

 

The portal provides a number of notable features and is unique within eGovernment:

 

1.      Virk.dk is the result of a co-operation between authorities at all levels. All Danish authorities involved with business regulation are participating in the development of Virk.dk providing digital solutions to the portal. More than 1300 forms related to businesses are integrated on Virk.dk as intelligent e-forms and the companies can report data and retrieve business relevant information from more than 52 authorities.

 

2.      The digital solutions are based on advanced ICT-technology. The portal is build on Open Source technology and all transactions between public authorities in the standardized OIOXML format. Additionally, the portal offers a host of services that the public authorities can use in their deployment of digital solutions on the portal. Most noticeable is the Single Sign On component which is now providing secure login on a range of digital solutions and also a number of other public websites.

 

3.      The portal is unique in design and is build on a new “search paradigm” that offers a scalable platform, user-friendly and fast one-stop-shop for all business related communication. This unique paradigm has created a platform that not only scales effectively for the Danish authorities but also provides ease of use for multilingual solutions and today Virk.dk offers solutions in English, German, and Polish among others.

 

 

4.      Virk.dk is putting businesses in the centre offering a number of comprehensive workflows that are customized in a way so that the flow comprehends all the information given and automatically finds the relevant forms bases on each individual user. A case in point is the company start-up workflow. The user is automatically guided through a questionnaire concerning the scope of the new business. Based on the answers, the system will prevent the user from filling out irrelevant forms and answering questions not related to the individual user and her business.

 

 

The success of Virk.dk is illustrated by the traffic on the portal, which is steadily rising. In March 2008 Virk.dk counted around 60.000 transactions a month compared to over 180.000 in March 2009 with more than a doubling in the number of registered companies on the portal.

Policy Context

The new one-stop-shop business portal Virk.dk was launched in March 2008 in a replacement of the old Virk.dk portal. The portal was new, not only in its design and technological setup, but also with a new strategic focus, a new organisational setup and with ambitious political goals.

 

The new portal plays a critical role in implementing and driving the digital political objectives in Denmark. The main goals are to switch communication channels from traditional paper channels to fully digital channels. After 2012 all relevant documents and letters must be in digital formats and all paper based channels will be rolled back and only be used in unique cases. The digitalization effort goes hand in hand with another ambitious political goal which is to reduce all administrative burdens for businesses by 25 percent by 2010. To achieve these two major objectives, a new portal on a new technological platform and paradigm was launched to replace the old outdated portal.

 

Everything Digital

In the Government strategy from June 2007 for Better Service, Digital Solutions, Higher Efficiency and Stronger Cooperation the goal is to shift the traditional communication channels between citizens, business and the public sector from paper to the new digital channels. One of the main digital vehicles in this transition is the portal Virk.dk and the advanced communication features that the new portal offers. One of the main new features to come is an email client, where all parties can send and receive email correspondence, exchange documents and track their pending cases with all government agencies.     

 

Reduce Administrative Burdens

Relieving the administrative burdens on companies has a high priority in Denmark, and

The Danish Government has since its commencement in 2001 stressed the importance of relieving the companies of administrative burdens. Virk.dk offers several digital solutions that today are sharing data between agencies in order to spare the businesses from double filing. Virk.dk is driving several initiatives to further reuse data between government agencies and local authorities with substantial reduced administrative burdens as a result. Also, Virk.dk has developed a statistic tool to count usage of digital solutions and what the individual solution contribute to the reduction of the administrative burden. This tool counts in real time across all agencies and authorities and is a powerful demonstration of what digital solutions can achieve.

 

The organizational focus has also been strengthened with the launch of the new portal. The old portal was for most parts controlled and managed by the supplier and with little or no control of the daily changes and technological issues from the Virk.dk authorities. This was changed with the new portal where the Virk.dk organization has hired it-project managers and technical experts to lead the development in order to get firsthand ownership of all technical aspects of the portal. It was paramount for the new organizational setup to be in control and be able to respond swift to any issues that could negatively affect user adoption.

 

Additionally, this in-sourcing strategy has greatly improved the Virk.dk organizations relationship with other agencies. The Virk.dk organization can now support lesser technical agencies with their handling of suppliers and can now more and more be considered as a Centre of Excellence on digital solutions, it-management and supplier contracts.

 

Description of target users and groups

The target users of Virk.dk are all danish businesses and all foreign businesses that wants to conduct business in Denmark. The fundamental objective for the portal was to built a one-stop-shop for all reporting, filing and communication between businesses and all government agencies and authorities. By expanding the platform to other nationalities, Virk.dk is striving to enhance business opportunities for foreigners in Denmark, reduce cost and generate savings and provide an open and inclusive business environment in Denmark.

 

Besides supporting the general business environment, there are two professions that Virk.dk offers special attention. The two segments are auditors and laywers which in many ways have special needs and are facing unique problems. These two groups are especially important to cater to since they do reporting and filing on behalf of their clients and use the systems on a daily basis. This is an aspect that is been integrated in the new personalized access to Virk.dk, the project is called My Virk and offers extended options for controlling access, remembers the users preferences and sends reminders for reports. Virk.dk is especially looking forward to launching a host of offerings that can ease the work for auditors and lawyers and make it even easier to communicate with Danish authorities.

Description of the way to implement the initiative

A Secretariat forthe Domain Boardis in charge of the daily coordination between the participants. The secretariat is called Center for Virk.dk and is placed in the Danish Commerce and Companies Agency, which has the contractual responsibility in relation to Virk.dk and stands for eventual contract-negotiations with Virk.dk. .

 

Center for Virk.dk is responsible for monitoring of the daily operation of Virk.dk and  ensures that Virk.dk offers administrative relieves and that the portal becomes a user success. This role includes creating tools to monitor the fulfillment of the objectives of the portal, identifying smaller projects and recommending new projects to the Domain Board of Business.

 

Center for Virk.dk and the authority team deals with eventual problems between the authorities and Virk.dk. Additionally Center for Virk.dk is in charge of producing proposals for the marketing strategy, and to carry out the strategy across the public sector and coordinating actions of marketing with Virk.dk.

Technology solution

Design and Technical Setup

The old portal had several problems that the new portal has addressed effectively. First of all, the old portal had technological problems that slowed the adoption rate among users. Also, the agencies and local authorities did not feel any ownership over the digital solutions on the portal which for most parts had been built by the Virk.dk technical organisation without inclusion of the individual agency. For this reason, many agencies continued to build new digital solutions and placed them on their own websites and discontinued their support to Virk.dk.

 

The new portal addresses these issues on several new fronts. The portal has been built on a “thin glass plate” principle. This principle basically means that the portal does not own any digital solutions but that the solutions are hosted and administered by the agency or local authority. The user will still see and interact with the digital solution via the Virk.dk portal and will feel that they never left Virk.dk. The technological setup can be illustrated this way:

 

 

 

 

With this setup, all agencies and local authorities can keep ownership over their different digital solutions and the Virk.dk portal can focus on other important strategic objectives.

 

 

 

Build to Last

The new portal is also built with a clear focus on scalability. The portal can manage all kinds of digital solutions and handle all kinds of traffic. Lately this has been demonstrated when the portal opened up for multilingual offerings. Today Virk.dk offers more than 50 digital forms in English. Additionally, businesses from UK, Poland and Germany can now register for Foreign Service Providers on digital solutions made in their native languages online on Virk.dk. Virk.dk will later this year integrate additional service offerings to foreign businesses - starting with the Services Directive – in order to enhance and support business initiatives in Denmark by foreign nationals.

 

On of the most important task when developing the strategy for the design and technological setup was to address future needs without knowing what they could be. The answer to this challenge was a design build on the concept of “search”. Search is the most efficient way for all users to find things online and all users have matured substantially in search skills. Virk.dk has placed search technology at its core design and product. All digital solutions are searchable from free text or the more advanced facetted search. This approach has solved the scalability problems and today Virk.dk offers more than 1.300 digital solutions which are easily searchable and accessible with one click. As mentioned above, this design decision made it possible to scale across multilingual digital solutions and still keep the portal unified in look and feel and without developing language specific sections in the back-end.

 

Single Sign On

In order to secure the information entered at Virk.dk the companies must be registered users and possess a certificate to be able to log-on and digitally sign e-forms on Virk.dk similar to the common home banking solutions. Any Danish company can get up to ten electronic certificates for free through Virk.dk.

 

The electronic signature is a legally binding and a secure feature used to sign e-forms.  The certificate is used to identify the employee, when he acts on behalf of the business, i.e. when signing documents or gaining access to classified information. It also protects the information sent and received by coding and decoding it.

 

The electronic signature was initiated by the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation and is based on a common standard for secure certificates. This means that the digital signature can be used as Single Sign On on all Danish websites with a digital signature service, which would otherwise require a username and a password.

Technology choice: Standards-based technology, Accessibility-compliant (minimum WAI AA), Open source software

Main results, benefits and impacts

Positive Press

After the launch of the new version of Virk.dk there has been many positive reactions from all parts of the press and technical institutions. The press has written in a very positive way about the new setup and the management of such a large scale project. Additionally, the positive press coverage has provided a positive environment and affected positively the relationships to the many public authorities.

 

Best on the Internet

In the yearly evaluation by the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency of the public websites ‘Best on the Internet’ did  Virk.dk in 2008 receive Virk.dk top mark on all counts. The evaluation evaluates the navigation, presentation, user-friendliness, utility, technical availability and openness on the site. In the evaluation Virk.dk received 5 points out of 5 possible points - in what is called called netkroner in Danish - which is the highest possible score. Moreover Virk.dk was nominated for the best public portal that year.

     

Increase in Users and registered companies

The number of transactions and users demonstrates the tremendous growth and impact of Virk.dk since its launch in March 2008. Since March 2008, the number of transactions has increased from about 60.000 a month to more than 180.000 in March 2009. The number of registered companies that has signed up to use the portal, has increased from around 16.000 business to more than 33.000 in March 2009. Below charts illustrates the growth of the two metrics

(For additional data of growth rates and other metrics, see attached appendix).

 

 

 

Reports that makes life easier

There are some reports that attracts more attention because of their huge success and that is the digital solution for the Compensation for Sickness Program, e-Invoice solution and the Business Registration Form. The digital solution for the Compensation for Sickness Program reuses data and is very easy to use. Today this solution stands as the benchmark of how to build lasting and successful solutions since it is very user friendly, reuses data and today only about 20 percent are still using the old paper channel for the program. The e-invoice is another great example of the offerings Virk.dk provides. Via the XML format the e-invoice makes it possible to send invoices to all public authorities from Virk.dk on a stand alone digital solution. It is very user-friendly and provides an easy way for the non-tech-savvy users to do business with the public sector.

Track record of sharing

Virk.dk is one of a kind, when it comes to the number of reports placed in the same portal and with so many of them being single sign on solutions. Other countries has looked at the way, that we have organised the portal and therefore has visited us to hear more about it. Finland, Sweden, Austria and other countries have visited and have had time to meet the people working with the portal on everyday basis and ask them questions.    

 

There is also a strong and ongoing cooperation with the other Danish portal Borger.dk, which is a portal with the angel of the citizens and has a collection of information and reports for the citizens and their contact with the public sector.

 

The Government has set up domain boards on different areas to insure communication and coordination with ITC initiatives. It is important that knowledge and experience is shared, but is even more important that is possible to share solutions and tools.      

 

There is made several organizational initiative to make that sure, that knowledge and information is being shared. Amongst them is Myndighedsforum (network of authorities) and a information site for them Myndighedsnet, which is a sub site at Virk.dk. There is held monthly meetings/workshops/courses in Myndighedsforum. On Myndighedsnet (http://myndighedsnet.virk.dk/) you will find news, all relevant information for integration on Virk.dk, invitations for relevant events, manuals and so on.

 

The secretariat for Myndighedsforum and Myndighedsnet is placed in the Danish Commerce and Companies Agency, where there also now is established a team of staff, who handles the contact with the authorities. This is all initiative to accomplice a professionalization of the contact and to make the integrations to Virk.dk smoother and faster.   

 

Another initiative is the promotion of shared components, where Virk.dk also is a frontrunner with its Digital Solution for Business (in Danish called BrugerRettighedsStyring), which is a part of the system portfolio for Virk.dk. It is part of the services that Virk.dk offers its business partners. It is a tool that controls access to the portal and it offers different options for assigning differentiated rights for the users. It can be used when submitting to Virk.dk, but it can also be used by others. At this moment the Danish Tax Agency, Statistics Denmark and in the future the Danish Environmental Protection Agency will integrate BRS in their new data system to report waste.

Another service that Virk.dk provides, is a tool that’s counts the numbers of users on the reports and offers it to everyone that integrates reports to Virk.dk.

 

Finally the Danish Commerce and Companies Agency is naturally willing to present the case at the Ministerial eGovernment Conference 2009 if selected to do so and is off couse willing and prepared to send more information if need.

Lessons learnt

1)      User centric

One of the main lessons leant with the second version of Virk.dk is the need to involve the users and listen to their needs  The first version of Virk.dk was a public private partnership, which had consequences for appearance of the site. It sent ambiguous signals, because it contained both public information, reports, news and adverts and therefore the users where confused about who the sender was. There was a need for sending a more clear signal about the portals purpose.

 

I the developing in of Virk.dk there has been, and is still being, used prototypes, user tests and personas, which is done to ensure that the portal meets the users need and demands. The user test often shows surprisingly views and draws attention to areas and subjects, that could have been overlooked otherwise. With prototypes it is possible to show the users beforehand an early version of the solution, which makes it easier and more inexpensive to implement new ideas, wishes for changes and so on. With personas you always keep your users in mind and it is very useful tool, when developing and testing new solutions and functionality. All the three initiatives ensures a more effective portal and satisfied users.  

 

 

2)      Clear goals

The strategi for the second version of Virk.dk was to create a portal that joins all the business relevant forms and reports on a ‘glass plate’ construction. All unnecessary information is removed and focus is now only on forms and reports and presenting them in a way that makes sense for the users. Another goal was to ensure that the authorities integrates on Virk.dk in a proper fashion, so that the solutions not only works well but also looks nice and therefore Center for Virk.dk reorganized and allocated a team to have the contact with the authorities and follow up on their integration agreements.       

 

3)      Cooperation between authorities

The second version of Virk.dk has had a positive effect on the ownership at the authorities, because it offers a more stabil operation and offers more services for the authorities, which makes it easier to integrate their solutions to Virk.dk. The cooperation between the authorities and Virk.dk is day by day getting better and closer and this is one of the most important things to producing better and more effective digital solutions.

Scope: International, National, Pan-European