I work on a mongodb installation in a danish municipality. From the technical side mongodb has been great to work with.

I am curious why a municipality needs custom software. I mean, the scandinavian countries had standardised paper forms for most municipal tasks (population register, ledgers etc) already in the 17-18th century, and those were used nationwide, or at least throughout a single province. Why can't the same be done with software?

Well there are 98 municipalities and 98 ways to operate in a thousand different ways.

I’ve worked on quite a few multi-municipalitiy open source projects, like handling employee refunds on driving.

Basically I drive x kilometers for a meeting, I get paid x and the taxman gets the report. Simple stuff.

Well in the 6 parties involved there were 6 ways to interpret tax laws, 4 different agreements with unions on what rates to pay, 3 different payment systems with 3 very different ways of taking the reported data from a flat file to a rest interface, at least one political decision to overrule tax laws for a certain set of employeees and several different ideas on how to host it and so single sign on, oh and 4 different ways to obtain employee data.

That’s for a simple system with basically 1 function. We have more than 350 it-systems.

Another example is in automation. We have a scanner software and we have an archiving system. They both have APIs but the APIs speak very differ languages. This meant that our local scanner people were tasked with distribution after they scanned things, a task taking several hours each week because putting files into many different areas of an archive sucks. What we did was ask the scanning company to build a QR reader into their software, and then we made a piece of software that put the archive recipient addresses into QR codes. We also made a MOX agent, that accepta the output of our scanning software and loads it into the archive through the API. So now the process of distributing is automated.

You can certainly run a municipality without developers, using standard software and outside hires, it’s just really expensive.

Would it be fair to say that the political entity one step above the municipalities (whatever that is in Denmark) are not doing their job? I mean not doing their job on standardising things that can be in common between the municipalities. Some things will of course have to differ, but a lot of stuff likely differ just because not-invented-here. It sounds like the legislative environment is too complex, and that you have to work around it with a ton of software. Could it even be the case that computer systems have somewhat removed the incentive for the administration to rationalise the various systems? With just manual labor and typewriters all of that would have been very expensive, but with a server hall and a medium-size IT-team it kind of works out. Perhaps digitalisation only having come half-way is a factor - you mention scanning, but by now the so called "paper free office" that was a buzzword in the 1990s should be here already. Or is it perhaps just another sign that the IT industry overall is still very immature and this will sort itself out with time?

I think it's too complicated to blame anyone really. I mean, we working on standardising as much as possible, but it's often impossible because business practices are just so different. Often big standard products fall extremely short, or end up in complete failures because you can't jam people into boxes on an enterprise scale especially not when the people who build the systems have next to no domain knowledge and the people who write contracts have no technical knowledge. :)

I guess our government should work on writing laws that are more friendly to digitisation and stop expecting IT to fix business practices that don't really make sense in the first place. There has been a genuine movement toward that, but it's slow because none of our top politicians or bureaucrats are from technical fields, and they operate on such a high strategic level that they're often rather far from the daily challenges in a daycare institution.

Local political leadership and bureaucracy could certainly do more to focus on corporation, standardisation and digital transformation, and they actually do, but political views differ and they change every 4 years, and the truth is that there just isn't any voter interest in IT unless it goes wrong.

We're trying to build national standards, we've had a set of architectural standards called Rammearkitekturen for a few yers now, but getting them implemented is slow. For one they're made by muniplicities and our structure of government is split in three. Muniplicities, Counties and the State and each branch has it's own ideas, leading to bureaucracy and political differences. Some want us to use EU standards, others want us to build our own, and even if we decided, there are different sets of EU standards as well as different sets of Danish standards.

I personally think the best we can do is try to use whatever national standards are in favour, and build smaller applications on them, with open API's, and run everything as SaaS in infrastructures such as AWS or Azure. I also think we should do a lot more work on business development, modifying business practices before we throw IT at something.

But it's complicated and it's on a giant scale where even minor changes take years to implement