Public administration is not some neutral machine; it is a wielder of power whose actions affect people’s everyday lives every day. Too often decisions are delayed, responsibilities disappear, and information doesn’t flow. We have a system that not only stalls, but also produces unnecessary work, uncertainty, and unfairness. In this text I go through why the current administration needs shaking up, and what should be done so that bureaucracy once again becomes a system that serves people, not an obstacle to them.
The foundation of trust is found in the smoothness of everyday life
Administration as an obstacle in everyday life or an enabler?
Good governance is not just shuffling papers or strict compliance with administrative rules. It is making people’s everyday life easier, clarity, transparency, and trust. It means that an authority acts predictably, fairly, and in a way that a municipal resident or citizen understands what it is about, and can get their matter handled without unreasonable obstacles.
We have become accustomed in public administration to slowness, siloing, and unclear levels of responsibility. For example, when an individual municipal resident tries to clarify their right to a service or submit a request for rectification of a decision, they often encounter a labyrinth of many official levels that lacks a common language and simple guidance. This is not only about inefficiency; it is about justice and trust.
When a person does not understand how the system works or does not get answers, trust disappears. And when trust disappears, distance arises. For a citizen it does not matter whether responsibility belongs to the municipality, the state, or the wellbeing services county; they want to be heard and to get an answer within a reasonable time. Now, often they get neither.
Services on people’s terms
Good governance must not remain merely fine words. But that is exactly what has happened: we have agencies where more working time is spent on internal meetings than on helping citizens. We have collections of regulations that officials interpret freely like poetry—the outcome depends more on the interpreter than on the rule itself. Administration must not be a hall of mirrors with no way out.
The customer is not supposed to be the problem, but the reason the whole system exists. Timely and understandable decision-making does not require a new IT system—it requires will and common sense. If a person does not receive reasons, there is no transparency in the decision. And without transparency there is no justice. It’s simple.
Feedback must not disappear into a void
We must also understand that good governance is not self-evident.
In practice, this means that every authority should be able to say how many feedback messages their operations have received over the past six months, and what has followed from them. Too often feedback is handled formally, but nothing happens. Feedback should be a guiding part of operations, not a box to tick in development plans. In addition, municipal online services should prominently show how feedback is handled and on what schedule.
Involving customers does not mean giving away decision-making power. It means making decisions with an understanding of how they affect everyday life. That cannot be achieved without functioning interaction and the use of feedback.It is built on continuous interaction, feedback, and a desire to improve. If there are no feedback channels or they are not responded to, the system remains detached. Administration must be able to look in the mirror and ask whether we serve people or structures.
Taking responsibility starts from within the structures
The everyday consequences of decentralized administration
Shirking responsibility between the municipality and the state, shifting administrative structures around, or delaying does not serve anyone. This is visible, for example, in situations where a wellbeing services county makes decisions without up-to-date information about the municipality’s service needs, or the municipality does not recognize which authority a citizen can contact. The result is being bounced around, where responsibility is no one’s—and the municipal resident is left alone. We need an administration in which the authority truly bears responsibility and acts so that a person feels they have been treated fairly. Good governance does not hide behind structures, but makes its operations and decisions openly, and explains them so that an ordinary citizen understands.,
Inefficiency, duplication and information breaks – the cancer of bureaucracy
This is also an economic question.
One key way to free up resources is the automation of internal administrative reporting obligations and monitoring structures. At present, many officials use a considerable part of their working time producing separate reports for different systems—often manually. These processes could be digitized and linked to national data repositories, so that reporting would take place as part of normal operational work.
Automating reports and statements would significantly free up experts’ and supervisors’ working time for their actual core tasks: planning, coordinating, and developing services. At the same time, it would improve the quality, timeliness, and integrity of information. At present, the problem is that decision-makers do not always have up-to-date and consistent information available—data is scattered, contradictory, or outdated.
Too many decisions are based on assumptions or an incomplete view of the whole. At worst, information does not move from one authority to another, and joint decision-making between municipalities and central government is based on entirely different baseline data. Ensuring real-time, coherent, and accurate information is critical for the legitimacy of administration. Problems are exacerbated by the fact that the systems used at different levels—such as the state, wellbeing services counties, and municipalities—do not always communicate with each other. This leads to the same information having to be requested multiple times in different formats, or at worst officials receive answers from each other on paper forms that must be manually attached to the pending matter. This slows processing, increases the risk of errors, and puts experts’ time in the wrong place. experts’ and supervisors’ working time for their actual core tasks: planning, coordinating, and developing services. At the same time, it would improve the quality and timeliness of the information base, as data would move directly from systems without hand-written intermediaries.
Digitization and the clarification of processes should be invested in considerably more than at present—not only at the customer interface, but also in the administration’s internal support functions. The resources thus freed could be directed to where they are most needed: schools, care, prevention, and customer work that involves direct interaction.
Espoo’s electronic building permit service is a good example where automation and a clear progression of the permitting process have shortened processing times by several weeks. Similarly, in Vantaa a service channel model was introduced in which the customer receives help from one person throughout the entire customer journey—not dozens of different forms for different units. In these models, efficiency and a human-centered approach come together, and they also produce cost savings.. Inefficient administration costs. Overlapping systems, unclear processes, reports dozens of pages long that no one reads, and continuous self-assessment forms that no one uses—this is everyday life in Finnish bureaucracy. And it costs. It costs in time, it costs in money, and it costs in citizens’ trust. When administration is streamlined, services work better and trust in society also grows.
A practical example of good governance can be found in municipalities where service paths have been simplified. When the customer gets a clear answer with a single contact and the service proceeds without a new jungle of forms, the impression arises that society works. Such successes do not happen by accident; they require management commitment, staff training, and measuring the customer experience.
Service design and a culture of experimentation as a tool for administration
Another good practice is the use of service design in municipal decision-making. In Hyvinkää, a customer-oriented model has been piloted in social services, in which residents are involved already before decisions are implemented. This not only increases understanding, but also reduces the need for later corrections and conflicts. When committees and officials make decisions from residents’ perspective and test solutions on a small scale before broader rollout, costly mistakes are avoided and practices that actually work are achieved.
Local democracy and transparency in the digital age
A jungle of rules and official power without responsibility
Municipalities could publish background memos and preparatory materials for decision-making more openly, and ensure that those without digital skills can also participate. One option is regional resident meetings where matters prepared electronically are discussed together before decisions. In this way, technology supports democracy, rather than replacing it.
Digital participation does not mean only opening online services. It means real influence—that the municipal resident knows who decides, what they decide, and when they can influence.
One concrete step would be to enable city residents to vote on key local zoning changes or development projects through strong electronic identification. Such solutions could be piloted in municipalities where residents’ participation is genuinely to be strengthened.
But let’s be honest—there is no readiness to implement this. The biggest obstacle is not technical, but political and administrative. Direct influence is feared to mess with the power of councils or slow decisions. But if the system fears the citizen’s voice, something is badly wrong.. It means real influence—that the municipal resident knows who decides, what they decide, and when they can influence. Electronic participation must be as easy as logging in with bank credentials, and real participation, not just a comment field.
Multiple approvals and internal administrative inefficiency
Cooperation between the state and municipalities cannot be based on assumptions
Building good governance does not require miracles. But at the moment we have a system in which nearly every decision is subject to approval at three different levels. Bureaucracy has become layered so that a supervisor checks what an expert has already verified once, and after that management approves the same again—often only formally. This does not bring quality; it brings slowness and irresponsibility.
The same phenomenon appears in planning. For each project its own reporting chain is built, even though the same information can already be found in existing systems. Within administration there is no courage to say that enough is enough—that now we do things simply, efficiently, and boldly. Political backing is needed for the idea that administration is also led with risk-taking and decision-making ability, not only with delay and the logic of fear. But it requires understanding that public administration is not individual actors, but a whole. Often cooperation between municipalities and the state is built on assumptions: it is assumed that information flows, or that the other party has the same understanding of responsibilities. In practice this is not the case. The siloing of information, different systems, and unclear interfaces lead to one agency making decisions without understanding the effects on another.
In central government, a coordinated national strategy is needed that defines a common service promise: what level of service a citizen has a right to, regardless of whether the service provider is a municipality, a wellbeing services county, or the state. This would create common rules of the game and remove unnecessary duplication.
A service promise to the citizen – with one contact, responsibility made clear
The citizen does not need knowledge of the administrative structure, but answers and solutions. Therefore a service promise is needed, under which every authority has an obligation either to respond to the matter or to route it directly to the right body—without the customer having to repeatedly search for a new contact.
A model could be taken from the “one-stop shop” principles used in Estonia and Sweden, where the customer’s case is logged in the system and follow-up responsibility remains with the authority. In Finland, too, an operating model could be piloted regionally in which, after the service need is identified, the customer has a designated responsible person within the administration.
Shaking up administration is a political necessity
Ultimately, reforming administration is not only the task of civil servants; it is a political choice. Every municipality and every agency must be able to answer the question: how does our administration make a person’s life smoother?
We need a national basic map of administration that covers responsibilities, transparency, and development goals. The state can steer this with legislation and funding, but change happens in municipalities. Therefore the evaluation criteria must change: it is not enough to look at economic efficiency. Justice, the comprehensibility of decisions, and the smoothness experienced by the citizen must be measured.
Good governance is not only internal administrative quality. It is an operating culture that is reflected in every customer contact, decision document, and meeting memo. When administration operates transparently and fairly, it increases society’s resilience and keeps us in the same boat even in difficult times. It is a measure of society’s capacity to function. That is why now is the right time to make it a genuinely shared project—and to bring citizens into it..
In municipalities and the state, metrics should be introduced to measure customer experience, the timeliness of decisions, and the clarity of information. Likewise, we should delve into how much people’s time and effort is saved when matters are handled with one contact. This is not just developing administration—this is also building trust capital.
Control, auditing and measurement clogged up – who has time to do the actual work?
Citizen feedback should be processed systematically and transparently. Now feedback channels are scattered, and the municipal resident does not know whether they are truly being heard. Good governance requires that feedback is not ignored, but leads to changes. Municipal residents are the best experts in the smoothness of everyday life.
At the same time, we must pause to consider how much administrative working time is spent maintaining indicators, controls, and audits. We are required to have metrics for effectiveness, cost-efficiency, customer satisfaction, and transparency—but few metrics truly describe reality. At worst, we measure how well we measure.
A civil servant’s time is spent compiling reports and summaries when they should be meeting a person, solving a problem, or developing a service. Audit rounds and project monitoring require massive documentation packages that no one has time to read—but that must still be produced. In this way an apparent system is created where effectiveness is secondary, as long as the documentation is in order. and transparently. Now feedback channels are scattered, and the municipal resident does not know whether they are truly being heard. Good governance requires that feedback is not ignored, but leads to changes. Municipal residents are the best experts in the smoothness of everyday life.
In central government, there must be courage to cut unnecessary intermediate layers and dismantle internal administrative silos. Decision-making must be based on the overall picture, not each agency’s own angle. Good governance appears to the citizen as a common line and a clear service—not as a many-headed dragon that no one leads.
Good governance is not the specialized expertise of a few but a basic right of everyone—and it should be visible at the everyday level, not in ceremonial speeches. When the system does not work, it is not the fault of an individual civil servant—but of the whole that has been built too much around administration and not around people.
We must dare to look directly at what is not dared to be said in Finnish public administration: part of administration sustains itself. If we do not dare to shake structures, measure effectiveness with the right criteria, and dismantle inefficiency also from the top down, we will not achieve change.
Now is the time to build an administration that does not hide in charts, but walks alongside people—sensibly, fairly, and responsibly.
Source: Uusi Suomi
Markku Arvekari
Digital Transformation Expert
